A Chinese Tertiary Hospital Compared 10 Robots With 19 Manual Porters

Medication and specimen runs that never stop

Inside a tertiary hospital in China, the corridors between the pharmacy, the wards and the clinical laboratory carry a constant flow of medications and specimens. None of those runs can wait, and each one ties up a person who could be doing something else.

Before the comparison began, 19 manual transport workers covered these routes. Their legs were slow and variable: the pharmacy to ward run took 31 minutes (with a spread of 6.2 minutes), and the ward to laboratory run took 38 minutes (with a spread of 7.2 minutes).

Omissions were the quieter risk. Manual handling produced an omission rate of 0.056 percent, and on a medication run even a rare missing item is a serious matter. Hospitals weighing a medication transport robot usually start with exactly these three pressure points:

• Long pharmacy to ward legs that stretch nurse time between patients
• Ward to laboratory specimen runs that delay results
• Omission risk on every handoff, however small the rate

Ten robots run beside a 19 person crew

The hospital did not switch its transport over in one move. It set up a controlled comparison in which ten autonomous mobile robots ran the same core routes while the manual crew kept working, and both groups were measured over six months.

Every leg was timed, every delivery was checked for verification and item integrity, and satisfaction was tracked among nurses and patients. That structure is what lets the outcomes be read side by side rather than as impressions.

• Map the two core routes: pharmacy to ward, and ward to laboratory
• Run ten robots on scheduled trips alongside 19 manual transport workers
• Time each leg and log verification checks on every delivery
• Track omissions, nurse satisfaction and patient satisfaction across all six months

Faster legs, more trips, fewer omissions

Delivery time was 32 to 36 percent lower with robots than with manual delivery, a difference that reached statistical significance (p below 0.001). Pharmacy to ward fell from 31 minutes to 21 minutes, and ward to laboratory fell from 38 minutes to 23 minutes.

Over the six months, the 10-robot fleet completed 7.3 times as many delivery trips as the 19 manual workers. Verification accuracy and item integrity reached 100 percent in the robot group, and the omission rate dropped from 0.056 percent to 0.004 percent (p = 0.011).

Nurse and patient satisfaction ran significantly higher in the robot group (p below 0.05). A 10 year lifecycle analysis, including sensitivity analysis, put the robot system's savings at 6.928 million RMB.

What a robot leasing for business plan asks of a site

The hospital story is about routes, timing and people, and it works as a checklist for any operation weighing delivery robots. Service Robot Co. is a vendor 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 network of more than 1,700 US service engineers, with coverage across all 50 states and 85 plus metros.

We lease robots only, on a three year lease with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. That assessment is where route lengths, elevator access and staff workloads get measured, which are the same questions this hospital trial had to answer before the numbers could mean anything.

A related feasibility study at another tertiary hospital found that elevator congestion can affect delivery reliability, and that nurses and pharmacists reported extra micro tasks even after support staff's manual loads fell. Those are the details a rollout plan should settle before the first robot moves.