Four Robots, Three Hospitals: What BayCare's Expansion Shows

What did BayCare add in June 2026?

On June 3, 2026, BayCare Health System announced two more Relay robots for its Winter Haven hospitals. The robots, named Stork and Miles, went to Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women's Hospital. With them, four Relay robots now run across three BayCare hospitals, according to the announcement as carried by trade press.

The short answer is that the expansion is public and specific, the robot roles are described, and the headline success figure comes from the vendor. Each of those points deserves more care than a press release gives it.

How are the two new robots assigned?

Stork carries specimens from the first-floor clinic to the second-floor lab at the women's hospital. Miles covers departments at the main hospital that lack pneumatic tube systems. Both role descriptions come from Relay and from coverage that repeats its release, so read them as the vendor's account of the work.

The split is worth noticing. A specimen run between two fixed floors is a narrow job with a clear start and end. A department without tubes is wider, with more doors, more elevator waits and more handoffs between staff. The two robots are not doing the same kind of work, so any results should be read by route type rather than averaged across the system.

What did the 2025 St. Anthony's pilot report?

BayCare's first Relay units, Beaker and Hygeia, operated at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg. BayCare introduced Beaker in a June 2025 newsroom item. The figure that now travels with the expansion is a 99.8 percent delivery success rate across 50 deliveries a day.

Relay's announcement and its case study both list the 99.8 percent as a reliability rate from that pilot. Trade coverage carries the same claim forward as proof of concept. None of the pieces reviewed described an independent audit of the trip logs behind the number.

Why is the 99.8% figure vendor-reported?

The volume numbers do not line up cleanly. A 2025 Bay News 9 report says staff sometimes made 40 to 60 lab trips a day before the robots arrived. Relay's LinkedIn page describes 40 to 60 lab deliveries a day. The 50 deliveries tied to the 99.8 percent sit inside both ranges, but the sources count different things, trips made by people and deliveries made by a robot, and no published counting rules were found in this review.

Arithmetic shows the scale. At 50 deliveries a day, a 99.8 percent success rate leaves room for about one failed run every ten days. That is a strong result if it held across the pilot. It is still the vendor's count, from the vendor's logs, and the reviewed sources name no outside party that checked it.

A success rate also depends on its definition. A run that a nurse finishes by hand after the robot stalls might count as a failure, or might not. A run delayed by a closed door might not count at all. Without those rules written down, the figure tells a reader what the vendor chose to count.

What do the projected numbers promise?

Relay projects that the two new robots will complete more than 500 deliveries each month and save more than 150 clinical hours each month, combined. The company presents this as a projection, not a measured result. No independent reporting on post-launch delivery counts was found as of this review.

A hospital reading projections like these should ask how each number was produced. Four questions do most of the work:

• Which trips count as a delivery, and is a failed or rescued run logged?
• Are clinical hours timed by the robot's internal clock or estimated from trip counts?
• How many staff trips did the robots replace, and were those trips counted before launch?
• Who holds the trip logs, and can the hospital export them without the vendor's help?

Where do pneumatic tubes still leave a gap?

Miles was sent to departments without pneumatic tube systems, which is a useful reminder of what tubes do well and where they stop. Tubes move small, sealed carriers quickly along fixed paths. They cannot reach a department that was never plumbed for them, and they cannot carry a loaded cart, a bulky supply or a tray that someone has to walk.

A hospital weighing a robot against tubes should map which routes the tubes cover today, which they never reached, and where people are walking the gaps by hand. The robot earns its place in the gaps. The tube system keeps the routes it already serves. Treating the two as rivals tends to hide the more useful question, which is where the walking happens.

Why does a four-robot, three-hospital footprint matter?

Moving from one pilot site to three hospitals is a different test. Each building brings its own elevators, staff habits, corridor widths and specimen schedules. A route that runs cleanly in one facility can stall in another, and a system spread over three sites has to keep its logs consistent across all of them.

The expansion is the clearest public sign that BayCare judged the early results worth extending. That is a reasonable reading of the decision. It is still a decision to add robots, not proof of an hour saved at Winter Haven.

BayCare is also testing a separate robot for patient transport. According to trade press, a Rovex pilot at Morton Plant Hospital began in April 2026 with no patients moved yet. The two projects are at different stages, and the reporting does not yet show any patient results.

How should a hospital scope its own delivery robot pilot?

A hospital that wants to test this model should start with one route, one written metric and a trip log it controls. Mapping the route, the elevators and the staff handoffs before the first run is what makes the early data worth reading. A pilot program that skips that step produces numbers nobody can defend later.

Service Robot Co. approaches commercial sites this way. We are an OEM-neutral integrator, so the robot is chosen for the floor it will run on, drawn from more than one manufacturer. We then finance, deploy, integrate, train staff and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, with one partner and one number for the whole lifecycle.

Customers take on a 3-year lease for each robot, with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment. A single leased unit is a sensible start for a hospital that wants a measured pilot before any wider rollout, and the site assessment is where the route and the metric get written down.