BayCare's Winter Haven Relay Robots: Questions Hospitals Should Ask

What did BayCare add at Winter Haven?

On June 3, 2026, BayCare announced two Relay robots, named Stork and Miles, at Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women's Hospital, according to Robotics Tomorrow. Coverage of the expansion cites delivery reliability above 99% and no infrastructure changes. Both headline claims come from the vendor and from press reports, and neither has been independently verified.

For hospital facilities and logistics leads, the rollout is more useful as a checklist than as a verdict on one robot. The questions it raises are the ones your own team should answer before a robot enters a corridor.

Which robot covers which run?

The sources do not agree on the split of work. One report says Stork carries lab specimens while Miles covers medication and supply transport in wings without pneumatic tubes. Another says Stork moves specimens from Urgent Care to the second floor lab at Women's Hospital, while Miles covers pharmacy and supply runs at Winter Haven Hospital.

That disagreement is a lesson in itself. Naming each robot's origin, destination and run type is basic planning, and it is worth doing whatever the vendor's numbers turn out to be. BayCare did not start at Winter Haven either. A 2025 pilot with two robots at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg came first, per the June 2026 coverage.

How much weight does the 99% figure carry?

Relay says its robots have over 99% delivery reliability, and a Relay linked report describes the figure as 99% or more. A more precise 99.8% figure is tied to two separate scopes. One source ties it to the delivery success rate of the 2025 two robot pilot at St. Anthony's, while Relay's case study ties it to reliability across the BayCare fleet.

No Winter Haven specific reliability measurement appeared in any source reviewed. That does not make the number false. It means the figure describes a pilot or a fleet rather than the floors your team would be signing up for, and no independent party has checked it in the coverage reviewed. Ask the vendor these four questions before you rely on it.

• What counts as a delivery, and is a run that a staff member finishes after a stall logged as a success or a failure?
• Which site, floors, fleet size and dates does the figure cover?
• Are elevator waits, door holds and staff handoffs inside the timer or left out?
• Can the vendor share raw trip logs for the same period, rather than a summary percentage?

What does the no infrastructure changes claim cover?

Relay says its robots can call elevators and open secure doors without staff help. A local newspaper reports that the team mapped the robots' routes through the hospitals and set elevator sensors so the robots could board. BriefGlance describes the deployment as needing no facility modifications.

All three statements can be true together. Relay's own material says elevators are configured during installation so they can communicate with the robots, which is a configuration step even without construction. A Relay release about HCA Florida JFK, a separate hospital, says robots integrate into existing infrastructure without major facility modifications. The word major carries weight, so ask the vendor to list every change to controls, access credentials, door hardware and elevator interfaces, even where nothing is physically altered.

Do the volume and hours projections agree?

They do not. Relay projects more than 500 deliveries across the two robots in a month, while another source cites 150 or more deliveries a day, collectively. On labor, one figure projects about 150 nursing or clinical hours, while Relay's case study reports 600 or more hours saved for the BayCare fleet. The sources do not reconcile the time periods or scopes behind these numbers.

Treat a projection on a vendor page as a hypothesis to test. Before you adopt any hours figure, record how staff actually spend time on the same runs over a set period, then measure again after go live using identical definitions. Hours saved should mean hours moved to other work, not a number that never appears on a timesheet.

What is worth copying from BayCare's rollout?

Start small and phase in. BayCare's 2025 pilot used two robots before the Winter Haven expansion added two more. A short pilot lets a team learn elevator wait times, door timing and handoff habits on a few routes before the whole building depends on the fleet.

Build the route map with nursing, pharmacy, lab and facilities staff in the same room. Write down who clears an elevator that will not board, who recovers a stuck robot, and how a blocked corridor is handled. Keep trip logs from day one, because a log is the record that settles later arguments about reliability.

Where does Service Robot Co. fit in?

Service Robot Co. leases robots only, on a lease running three years with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment. We are OEM neutral, so we select robots across manufacturers for the job, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network. For a hospital team, that means one provider answers for the elevator interface, the route map and the service call.

Nothing in the sources reviewed connects Service Robot Co. to Relay or BayCare, and this article does not suggest any link. The questions above apply to any vendor. A site assessment is where a facility team can get reliability definitions, a written list of elevator responsibilities and trip log access settled before a robot runs its first corridor.