Four robots are working overtime at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, MD, and their hard work is speeding up medication deliveries.

The robots don’t complain, get tired, or need a break no matter how many hours they work. The mobile TUG robots-dubbed Rigby, Herbie the love TUG, Jake, and Elwood-simply coast the facility’s hallways 24 hours a day, seven days a week, delivering medications to the nursing stations. Thanks to all their hard work, staff who previously delivered medication have been able to spend more time on patient care and less on pushing carts.

The hospital brought Aethon’s TUG system on board in September which delivers medications to the nursing stations about every 45 minutes.

“[Previously] we were using staff who were doing hourly deliveries,” says Lisa Polinsky, pharmacy operations manager at Sinai. “Our goal with the TUGs was 30-minute deliveries. We have not reached it yet, but we are getting closer.”

The robots’ rounds start in Sinai’s pharmacy. Polinsky says here staff receive physicians’ medication orders, prepare the medications, and load them into drawers built into the TUGs. Using a touch screen, staff then program the TUGs to send them on their way to the units. The robots alert staff each time it makes a stop.
On the units, nurses punch in a code to open the TUG’s drawer and retrieve the medication. The TUGs then navigate back to the pharmacy where they dock themselves back on their bases to charge.

As efficient as they are at the facility, Polinsky says the TUGs took some getting used to. (A short video posted on Aethon’s Web site lets you see one in action.)

“Initially patients didn’t quite know what to do with them. Some were afraid of them and some people tried to talk to them,” says Polinsky.

To incorporate them into the hospital system, Sinai held a naming contest.

“We’ve kind of personalized them, making them more human-like,” Polinsky says. “Jake and Elwood were named after the Blues Brothers.”

Aside from never calling in sick, a big perk of the robots is that they are more cost effective than having staff delivering medications. According to the company that makes them, one TUG working just two shifts seven days a week works the equivalent of 2.8 full-time workers and costs only one-fourth as much.

Do you think technological advancements like this will help or hurt nursing?