How will automation take hospital logistics to the next level?

Industrial players have already witnessed large advances in automation in recent years. Now, these technologies are beginning to make significant inroads in the healthcare sector. This development is being driven by a shortage of skilled staff and by a growing number of patients.

Nurses are meant to look after their patients – but their days are filled with many other tasks, often logistical in nature: medicines and sterilized instruments must be in the right place at the right time, food and drink have to be served, medical equipment moved from one department to another, beds repositioned and samples sent to laboratories – and last but not least, someone has to deal with waste. Sophisticated intralogistics solutions can offer a helping hand with all these duties.

Delivery 4.0

To allow nursing staff to fully focus on patient care, large hospitals are now introducing automated solutions, e.g. automated guided vehicles (AGVs). These convey items such as medications fully automatically, and help avoid the delivery of incorrect items by means of RFID tracking systems. One example is proANT S.A.S.H.A* from InSystems Automation. This has already been deployed at Sidra Medical and Research Center in Qatar, where it automatically distributes pharmaceuticals and food.

Automated, autonomous assistants

The Texas Medical Center in Houston is also looking to take advantage of automation. TMC is currently working on a mobile robot that not only conveys items but can also load and unload centrifuges, pipette liquids and prepare medicines.

The current pandemic has highlighted the benefits of automated medical processes. The university hospital in Aalborg, Denmark, is employing an automated system* combining a robot and an RFID-equipped transport box to perform an especially monotonous but time-consuming process: the state-of-the-art system monitors and sorts up to 3,000 blood samples daily. Automating repetitive tasks of this kind eases the workload on laboratory staff.

In summary: hospital automation is becoming increasingly common. It offers a way of addressing staff shortages and increasing numbers of patients. And it also helps with the management of threats, such as pandemics, because digital, automated systems save time – allowing medical professionals to focus on their core tasks.


*German only