A Tertiary Hospital Pharmacy Cut Order Cycle Time 29.6% With a TUG Robot

Order queues and walking time in a busy tertiary pharmacy

A tertiary hospital pharmacy sits at the center of a building that never stops. Orders arrive from wards around the clock, and each one must be verified, filled, labeled and carried to the unit before a nurse can give the dose. Every leg of that journey depended on a person walking a corridor.

Before the robot, the mean time from order receipt to order exit was 73.9 minutes, with a standard deviation of 2.21 minutes. Label printing took 13.1 minutes on average, and idle time tied to medication delivery averaged 27.3 minutes. Those gaps compound quickly when deliveries run all shift long.

• Mean order cycle time before the robot: 73.9 minutes
• Label printing time before the robot: 13.1 minutes
• Mean idle time for medication delivery before the robot: 27.3 minutes

A TUG robot takes over the pharmacy to unit run

The pharmacy deployed a TUG autonomous mobile robot supplied by the robot supplier, which carries medications from the pharmacy to care areas. The robot handled most medications. Stat doses meant for immediate administration and controlled drugs stayed outside its scope, so the most time critical and tightly controlled items kept their existing handling.

Pharmacy staff kept their roles in verification and dispensing while the robot took over the transit leg. The after measurement was taken two years after implementation, so the figures describe a workflow that had time to settle rather than a launch week.

Measured gains in order speed and staff time

Mean total cycle time fell from 73.9 minutes to 52 minutes, a 29.6% reduction in the time from order receipt to order exit. The after figure carried a standard deviation of 28.6 minutes, which is wide, so the average hides a good deal of variation in how individual orders moved.

Technician delivery time dropped by 7.2 hours, and that time was put to other pharmacy tasks. The reported analysis notes the saved time let staff focus on other aspects of care, including engaging and educating families.

Label printing time fell from 13.1 minutes to 7.4 minutes, and idle time for medication delivery fell from 27.3 minutes to 15.3 minutes. The analysis also observes that robots used for telepresence, patient evaluation, and drug dispensing and delivery have produced time savings more broadly.

What this pattern means for a hospital buying team

The gains in this case came from one repeated job, a run between the pharmacy and the wards. That is the kind of task an autonomous mobile robot handles well, and it is also the kind of task that is easy to underestimate until someone measures it. Service Robot Co. starts from that measurement on every site.

Service Robot Co. is a full service, OEM neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network. One vendor covers the whole lifecycle, so the hospital works with one team instead of several.

We lease robots only, on a 3 year lease with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. That assessment maps routes, elevators, doors and floor surfaces, and it confirms which medications fall within scope before any number is promised. Details are at servicerobotco.com.