Hospital Robot Staff Hours: Checking the ROI Math

How many staff hours do hospital robots really return?

Vendors and hospitals report large staff-hour figures for hospital delivery robots, but those figures measure different things. Some count hours across a whole network, some count hours per hospital per month, and some are projections for a single machine. A figure becomes useful to one facility only after you know which of those it is.

The defensible answer for a single site is smaller and slower to earn. Start from your own delivery count and the minutes a trip really takes, then count only the hours you can release from a task. Vendor averages can frame the question, but they should not set the answer.

Below we sort the published claims by source type, show what each can and cannot support, and walk through the conversion step by step.

Who publishes these numbers, and how much weight does each carry?

Three kinds of source appear again and again. Vendors publish case studies and product pages. Hospitals and health systems publish their own results through press releases and local news. Independent researchers publish peer-reviewed observational work. A vendor figure is a sales input, a hospital figure is an account from one site, and a peer-reviewed study is the closest thing to a neutral measure, though it rarely names a robot model.

A workable rule is this. A vendor number tells you what to measure. A hospital number tells you what one site observed. An independent number can set the baseline. No single category is enough on its own.

What do the vendor figures actually measure?

Diligent Robotics, maker of Moxi, reports in its AWS case study 25 US hospitals, more than 1.3 million deliveries, and over 600,000 staff hours returned. It describes those hours as equivalent to 150 full-time employees. The page does not state the period over which the hours accrued, and that equivalence depends entirely on the period. The figure is vendor-reported.

Relay Robotics' product page claims 150-plus hours saved per month per hospital and a 99.8 percent successful delivery rate. Its BayCare case study gives 600-plus hours per month across its collective deployments and 150-plus deliveries per day. One figure is per hospital and the other is collective across sites. Comparing them without converting the unit will overstate what any one hospital should expect.

NEURA Robotics, in a company release reported by PYMNTS, projects that one bed-moving robot handling about 20 moves a day could return more than 1,300 staff hours a year. That is a projection, not a measurement, and it rests on a move count the buyer has to verify. Treat it as a hypothesis to test against your own bed moves.

What do hospital-reported results add, and where do they stop?

Saint Luke's Health System in Kansas City reported, as covered by Becker's Hospital Review, that Moxi saved 30 percent of bedside workers' time and more than 315 hours in its first 20 days. The short window is informative. Early results are often the most flattering, and a 20-day figure says nothing about steady state.

Children's Hospital Los Angeles, according to its chief innovation officer in an August news release reported by PYMNTS, cited more than 40,000 deliveries representing more than 16,000 hours of work. That is the hospital's own count for a mature, high-volume program. It shows what that program looked like, not what a community hospital with far fewer runs will see.

Single-user accounts need the same care. Arrive AI's October 2025 release, quoted by PYMNTS, said a medical assistant at Hancock Health spent at least 90 minutes a day on specimen walks before the robot arrived. One person's day illustrates the task well, but it is not an average for a unit. An unnamed 800-bed hospital cited in one vendor roundup, reporting 90 minutes saved per nurse per shift, is unverified because the hospital is not named, so keep it out of any budget.

What does independent research give you as a baseline?

A peer-reviewed observational study of two rural Bavarian clinics, run in July and September 2023, recorded a two-week transportation cost of 514 euros, equal to 24.73 hours of work, for two nurses per daytime shift. That study measured the work a robot could take over, not what a robot returns. The distinction is the whole point, and a baseline like this lets you test a vendor claim against something observed.

A two-phase study combining a scoping review of 199 studies with a 24-hour workload survey of 7,073 inpatients across 72 wards in six Chinese hospitals estimated that fully deploying catalogued robots could cover 62.37 percent of per-capita direct nursing workload. An analysis of that work calls this a theoretical ceiling that assumes every robot works at once, and says the realistic near-term figure is far lower. Use the number as a warning about overreach, not as a target.

How do you turn claimed hours into a number for one facility?

Work the calculation in this order, and use your own logs at every step. Each step can be checked on your floor, and the output is the only number that belongs in a budget.

• Count real runs per shift by type (specimens, medications, supplies, meals) from at least two weeks of logs, and mark the peak hours.
• Time a sample of those runs from pickup to drop, including elevator waits and door cycles, using your own staff.
• Keep only the minutes a robot would absorb that a person would otherwise perform, and exclude trips that still need an escort.
• Convert released minutes into hours a role could redeploy, because idle time is not a saving.
• Subtract the fixed lease payment, charging space, and staff time for loading and exceptions, then compare what remains against the vendor claim.

Which numbers only hold at certain volumes?

Most published figures are volume dependent. Relay's per-hospital monthly figure assumes that hospital's run count. NEURA's 1,300 hours assumes about 20 moves a day from one machine. Diligent's full-time equivalence depends on a multi-hospital base over a period the page does not state. A hospital running 150 runs a day and one running 40 will not get the same hours from the same robot.

Time matters too. Early months carry a learning curve for staff, routes and exception handling. Saint Luke's 20-day window is an early snapshot, so plan a first test long enough to capture a full week of mixed shifts before you extend the math to a year.

Where does Service Robot Co. fit into the math?

Service Robot Co. is an OEM-neutral integrator. We assess your floor and routes, choose the robot that fits the runs you actually have, and lease it to you on a 3-year lease with one fixed payment quoted after the site assessment. Our engineers deploy, integrate, train, and service each unit through a nationwide US network, so the hours you model are the hours you run.

The assessment exists to produce the inputs in the list above before a payment is quoted. That way the number your finance team reviews comes from your floor and not from an average. We do not publish a payment figure here, because it depends on the site.