Hospital Delivery Robot Claims: A Checklist Before Your Pilot

How should you test a hospital delivery robot claim?

Hospital delivery robot vendors publish numbers that sound alike but measure distinct things. A delivery success rate, a deployment window and a trip count can each be accurate and still say little about the hours your staff will get back. Before a pilot, you need to know what each figure measures, over what period, across how many units, and who did the counting.

Two recent public examples show the pattern. BayCare Health System expanded its Relay fleet to four robots in June 2026, and in September 2026 Relay announced that HCA Florida JFK Hospital had deployed two delivery robots. The public figures behind both stories are vendor reported, and none of them is a staff hour figure.

The sections below walk through what to confirm for staff hours, deployment time and trip counts, and what to put in writing before a robot ever reaches a corridor.

What did the BayCare Relay expansion add?

On June 3, 2026, BayCare Health System announced two more Relay robots, named Stork and Miles, which brought its fleet to four. Both went live at Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women's Hospital that June. Relay says the robots carry lab specimens and medications.

The route detail matters for a checklist. Stork at Winter Haven Women's Hospital handles 24/7 specimen transport from Urgent Care to the second floor laboratory. A narrow, repeating route like that is far easier to measure than a general courier role, and it is the kind of route a pilot should test first.

Keep the numbers apart, too. BayCare also runs a separate Locus warehouse system of 25 robots, and that fleet has no place in any Relay count you read.

Where does a trip count come from?

The original pair, Beaker and Hygeia, started at St. Anthony's Hospital. A 2025 pilot there reported a 99.8% delivery success rate across 50 deliveries per day. The source is Relay's own material, so treat it as a vendor claim until you have seen the underlying log.

A success rate is only as useful as its denominator. Ask what counted as a delivery, whether a run that a nurse finished by hand was scored as a success, and how many hours the robots were actually available each day. Relay also cites more than 99% delivery reliability, which is a separate measure again.

Request the log itself, with these fields for every trip.

• Date, time, origin and destination for every trip
• Trips that needed staff to load, unload, open a door or call an elevator
• Failed, aborted and rerouted trips, with the recorded reason
• Robot hours in service compared with hours scheduled
• The number of units in service on each day of the sample

What does an 8 to 12 week deployment cover?

Relay says a typical hospital deployment takes about 8 to 12 weeks, including integration hardware work, floor mapping and staff training. Onsite installation generally takes one to two weeks inside that window. The vendor offers this as a general figure for typical deployments, not as a measured timeline for any single site.

HCA Florida JFK Hospital in Atlantis, Florida, received two delivery robots, Dash and Daisy, in a deployment Relay announced on September 30, 2026. The robots handle lab specimens, medications and equipment. We found no source that says how long the JFK rollout itself took, so a brief that presents 8 to 12 weeks as the JFK timeline is repeating a general figure.

Ask for a dated schedule with a signed start date and a go live date. Define which steps sit inside the window, including floor mapping, elevator and door integration and the training sign off. The stretch between signature and first live trip is where schedule disputes tend to start, so measure it closely.

How do you test a staff hour claim?

None of the sources we found gives a staff hour saving for a hospital delivery robot. Relay's published figures cover delivery success, reliability and deployment time. A staff hour claim therefore needs its own baseline, and that baseline has to exist before the robot arrives.

Start with a walking and handling baseline for the exact route. Record who makes each specimen or medication run, how long it takes, and where the handoffs fall, such as the loading point, the elevator and the lab door. Repeat the sample across several shifts, because one good afternoon is not a baseline.

Then count what the robot still asks of your people. A run that needs a person at each end returns less time than one that does not, and the claim should say which kind it measures. A figure built on deployment duration or delivery success cannot stand in for hours returned to the ward.

What belongs in the written terms?

Verbal assurances do not survive a bad week. The written terms should define the vendor's words so that go live, successful delivery, reliability and uptime mean the same thing to both sides. Without that, every disputed run becomes an argument about vocabulary.

Write down what counts as a successful delivery, what the reliability figure is measured against, and who responds when a robot stops in a corridor. Ask for the support path as well, including how software faults are triaged remotely and when a technician attends onsite. Spare unit coverage and what happens to a route during a repair should appear there too.

How should a hospital start a pilot?

A pilot should test one route, with a fixed scope and stop criteria written down before the first run. A pilot can start with one leased unit on a single high volume route, such as specimens from one unit to the lab, and expand only after the trip log supports the claim. Name the staff roles in advance, so the person who clears a jam or reloads a tray is never a guess.

Service Robot Co. is an OEM neutral integrator. We choose the robot for the route rather than from one manufacturer's catalog, then arrange a robot lease through financing on a 3 year lease, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. Our site assessment maps the route before anything is installed, and our team handles robot deployment and integration, training and go live support.

RoboCare, our robot maintenance service plan, covers every unit we place, backed by regional service engineers in every state we service. One vendor carries the lifecycle, so the written terms, the trip logs and the service record sit in one place.