Hospital Delivery Robots Return 600,000 Staff Hours, Vendor Reported

Nursing time is the scarcest thing on the floor

Every hospital runs on a steady stream of small trips. Medications, linens, meal trays and supplies have to move from storage to the units, and specimens have to travel from the bedside to the lab, often on a fixed clock. Each trip pulls someone away from the work that only they can do.

Nurses feel that pull most sharply, and their time is the hardest to replace. When a shift runs short, a walk to the supply room or a specimen run to the lab comes straight out of the minutes that would otherwise go to patients. Few line items in a hospital budget are as scarce as an experienced nurse's attention.

The group of 25 U.S. hospitals described here moved that routine movement onto mobile delivery robots. The goal was to keep daily supply runs and specimen runs moving without asking clinical staff to leave their patients.

Mobile robots take over the daily runs across the group

The robots were placed across the 25 hospitals and used for the two jobs that repeat most reliably in a hospital day: daily supply runs and specimen runs. The robot supplier, not named here, provided the robot used in the deployment.

The working model is easy to describe. The robot carries the load along a set route, and the people on the unit stay where they are needed. Routine transport becomes a scheduled task rather than an interruption.

The steps below describe how a program of this kind is usually planned. They are general practice rather than a log of this group's rollout, and they match the way Service Robot Co. approaches every project.

• Site assessment and route mapping before any robot is committed
• A phased rollout that starts with a few units and expands as results come in
• Integration with existing supply and laboratory workflows
• Staff training for the people who load, receive and supervise the robots
• Go live support at startup
• Ongoing service through a nationwide US engineer network

1.3 million deliveries and 600,000 staff hours, as reported

The robot supplier reports that across the 25 hospitals, the robots completed more than 1.3 million deliveries. Those runs returned over 600,000 staff hours to patient care, a figure the supplier's own comparison equates to about 150 full time employees.

These are vendor reported figures, not an independent audit. They describe the group as a whole, not any single hospital, so they show the scale the supplier claims rather than a site by site record. A hospital weighing a similar program should ask for that site level account before relying on the total.

The clearest reading is about time. Six hundred thousand hours is time that did not go to walking a supply run or carrying a specimen tube, and the supplier's account is that it went back toward patient care.

What this asks of a hospital weighing a program, and where we fit

The hospital group in this study is not a Service Robot Co. client, and we did not deploy these robots. What the case shows is the shape of a program that holds up: the right robot for the route, a rollout that starts small, and a service model that keeps the units working after the install crew leaves.

That is the work we do. Service Robot Co. is a full service, OEM neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select robots across manufacturers, finance them through a three year lease with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment, deploy and integrate them, train staff, and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network.

For a hospital or health system weighing delivery robots, the first step is a site assessment that maps the routes, the traffic and the hours when runs actually happen. One partner, one number, from that first walk through to the last service call.