An ICU Delivery Robot in Taiwan Cuts Nurse Logistics Time 81.6%

Nurses carrying the hallway run

In a tertiary medical center intensive care unit in Taiwan, routine supply runs had fallen to the nurses. Every trip from storage to the bedside pulled a nurse out of the patient zone, down the corridor and back again. Each run looked small on its own. Across a full shift, they added up to a meaningful share of the day.

The problem was less about a headcount gap than about where skilled attention was going. The unit needed to know whether moving those routine runs to a machine would release enough nursing time to justify the equipment and running cost. ICU leaders weigh nursing hours against program cost whenever they consider new equipment, and this is a case where that trade-off deserves a close look.

A zone-based robot for routine supply runs

The deployment gave a delivery robot the routine supply transport that nurses had been handling by hand. The program was zone-based, so the robot worked defined areas of the unit rather than roaming the whole floor. Routine runs moved to the machine, and nurses kept the tasks that required clinical judgment at the bedside.

Before drawing conclusions, the study authors measured the baseline. Time-and-motion observations recorded how nurses spent their logistics time, and the robot's own task logs captured how the machine performed once it was running. Those two streams fed a model that compared usual care, with manual nurse transport, against a robot-assisted logistics model.

Costs were annualized over a seven-year equipment life at a 3% discount rate, which lets a hospital compare an equipment decision with recurring nursing time on equal terms. The authors then tested how sensitive the result was, running one-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses to see which assumptions mattered most.

• Divide the unit into service zones for routine supply transport
• Measure baseline nurse logistics time through direct observation
• Log robot tasks during operation
• Annualize equipment and program cost over seven years at a 3% discount rate
• Test the result with one-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses

What the numbers showed

Nurses' active logistics time fell from 111.34 minutes a day to 20.43 minutes, a reduction of 81.6 percent. The study authors estimate that about 553 nursing hours a year were released for other nursing work. These are model estimates built from the observation and task-log data, so they describe one unit rather than a guaranteed result for every ICU.

The cost side is where the case gets candid. The annualized program cost came to NT$1.65 million from the hospital perspective. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was NT$2,984 per nursing hour saved. The authors acknowledge that this exceeds prevailing wage rates, and they argue the program could still support better allocation of nursing time.

For an ICU manager, the useful reading is that the program buys nursing time at a price above its wage cost. The released hours become capacity for the unit rather than a line item that disappears from the budget, so the decision rests on what that time is worth to patient care.

Where a robot lease fits this kind of case

Service Robot Co. is a full-service, OEM-neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robot across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network. One partner covers the whole lifecycle, which matters when a hospital delivery robot has to fit real corridors, elevators and staffing patterns.

Our offer is a lease. Customers get a robot through financing on a 3-year lease with one fixed robot lease payment, quoted after a site assessment. That gives an operations team a clear cost line to set against nursing time, which is the same comparison this study makes.

The lesson from the ICU data carries over. Measure transport time before anything goes live, log what the robot actually does once it runs, and ask for the cost per hour saved. Service Robot Co. handles deployment and integration, go live support and service after installation, so the hospital team can focus on the zones and the workflow.