Peer Hospitals Run Robot Fleets: Measuring Your Gap

Are peer hospitals ahead on robot fleets?

Some are, and the lead is visible. BayCare runs Relay robots across three Florida hospitals, and Rochester Regional Health's Moxi robots passed 100,000 trips in August 2026. These are working fleets with published results, not demonstrations in a lobby.

A visible lead is still a weaker signal than it looks. The outcome figures come from the operators or their vendors, and we could not confirm a robot count for either fleet. We also did not find a verified figure for what a typical community hospital has in service today, so these two cases cannot show where an average site stands.

The more useful question for a planning team is narrower. Which runs do your staff make by hand every shift, and how many of those runs could a robot take safely?

What BayCare runs with Relay robots

According to Relay's own case study, BayCare's Relay fleet covers three Florida hospitals, and the robots are named Beaker, Hygeia, Stork and Miles. The case study does not name the three hospitals. A news aggregator summary of Relay's Winter Haven announcement says Stork and Miles are live at Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women's Hospital, and ABC Action News reported that Beaker and Hygeia first started at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg. Matching those reports gives a likely map of three hospitals, but it is our inference rather than a confirmed list.

The stated purpose is moving lab specimens, medications and supplies, partly because several BayCare hospitals lack pneumatic tube systems in key departments. That is a useful planning clue. The case for a robot often starts with a tube gap, not with a headcount target.

BayCare is also working with Rovex, a separate robotics startup. In April 2026 the health system announced a strategic partnership to pilot patient transport robots, including at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. Those are not Relay units, and patient transport carries a different risk profile from a specimen run.

What Rochester Regional reports from its Moxi trips

Rochester Regional's Moxi robots began in 2023 at Rochester General and Unity Hospital. A Fingerlakes1 report dated August 21, 2026 says they have completed more than 100,000 trips, and that the health system estimates they freed more than 50,000 staff hours. Rochester General logged more than 75,000 deliveries and Unity more than 25,000 since the robots began. The robots carry medications, supplies and lab specimens.

Read those figures with two cautions. They are the health system's numbers as reported by the outlet, and we found no Diligent Robotics release confirming them. The earlier estimate, reported by WHEC before the milestone, was that the robots could take on about 200 hours of work a week. That was a forecast from hospital leaders, so the hours should be read as the health system's own accounting.

Why peer numbers do not transfer to your hospital

Trip counts and staff hours depend on floor count, elevator access, door types, the tasks assigned and how a trip is defined. Two hospitals running the same model can post very different results, and a milestone at one campus says little about a building with a different corridor plan.

The public record has gaps too. CBS News reported in March 2026, in a piece reposted by Cedars-Sinai, that Moxi is in more than two dozen US hospitals and that the company told CBS it is at 25. Diligent has not published how many robots are operating, and its 'largest fleet' claim has not been independently verified. Its earlier milestone, more than 100,000 elevator rides across US health systems, was announced in November 2024, and it measures something other than a unit count.

Treat every figure in this article as a named claim, not a benchmark to copy.

Is there a typical community hospital number?

We did not find a verified figure for how many robots a typical US community hospital has in service today, so this article does not offer an average. Any number we printed would be a guess. The peers above are health systems that publish results, which makes them the visible end of the market rather than a sample of it.

A better test is task coverage. A hospital with no robots may still be well placed if its tube gaps and night runs are small. A hospital with a fleet can still have idle units or routes that staff walk anyway. Falling behind is about unmet work, not the number on a press release.

How to measure your own position in five steps

Start with records your hospital already keeps, or sample two typical weeks of runs. Measure the work first and the vendor headline last.

• Count specimen, medication and supply runs per shift for each unit, separating scheduled runs from urgent ones.
• Mark each route that crosses an elevator, a secured door or a staff handoff, since those set the real delivery time.
• List which departments have pneumatic tube coverage and which have none, since that is where a robot would add a route rather than duplicate one.
• Total the nursing and support hours spent walking those runs, using the same logs, so the hours have a source.
• Ask any vendor for dated trip logs with routes and downtime, not only milestone totals, before comparing results.

Where a lease fits once the gap is measured

Once the gap is measured, the next decision is which robot fits which route. Service Robot Co. is a full service commercial robot integrator and is OEM neutral, so we select robots across manufacturers for the task, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service them through a nationwide US engineer network. For specimen and medication runs, a hospital delivery robot lease is one option to price against the walking hours you measured.

Robots reach a customer through a lease. We begin with a site assessment and then quote one fixed lease payment on a lease term of three years, with mapping, go live support and on site dispatch handled by the same team. Naming Relay or Diligent in this article does not mean we work with either company, and any robot we recommend would be chosen for the route, not the headline.