A Gulf Coast Texas Hospital Campus: Vendor Reports 5,400+ Staff Hours Returned

Routine runs eating into care time

Hospital staff walk a great deal, and much of that walking has nothing to do with bedside care. Supplies, specimens and paperwork travel between departments in small, repeated trips that rarely appear on any schedule. Across a large campus, those trips add up to hours every day.

The campus in this study faced that pattern on its internal routes. The goal was to move routine support runs off busy staff and onto robots that could cover the same corridors day after day, with patient care left to the people who provide it.

• Repeated supply and specimen runs between departments
• Non-clinical walking that pulls on nursing and support time
• Shared corridors with patients, visitors and staff

Two robots, a small start and local upkeep

The campus started small. Two delivery robots were assigned to support tasks away from patient care, which kept the scope clear for staff and for the robots' routes.

The campus introduced the robots to staff by name and described them as robotic nursing assistants. According to the vendor, local staff were hired to maintain the robots.

• Start with two delivery robots on support tasks away from patient care
• Introduce the robots to staff by name
• Hire local staff to maintain the fleet, per the vendor
• Run routine internal runs for about seven months

What the vendor counted

Between March and September 2023, the vendor reports more than 27,500 deliveries and more than 5,400 staff hours returned. Those figures describe the robots' work on routine internal runs, the part of hospital logistics that rarely gets counted.

The numbers are the vendor's tally of this deployment. A hospital weighing a similar step should use them as a reference point and shape its own expectations around route length, run volume and how many robots are working.

Where a lease fits a routine-run program

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 our nationwide US engineer network. This study describes another organization's deployment, not a project we ran.

Hospital operators who want a similar program can review robot lease options through our financing. We offer a three-year lease with one fixed robot lease payment, quoted after a site assessment, so the figure reflects the actual campus rather than a generic price.

The site assessment comes first, before any robot is chosen or any payment is quoted. From there, deployment, staff training and service run through one partner.