Saite Robots Help with the Peak-hour Materials Delivery in The People's Hospital of Longhua Shenzhen

Earlier in 2022, the National Health Commission and other three departments jointly issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for National Health Informatization", proposing to improve medical artificial intelligence and 5G technology, IoT and other new standards system of information technology, to support the application in hospital management and other aspects. Hospital logistics plays an important role in keeping the stable operation of the hospital, and the hospital logistic delivery system is an important part of the hospital support system, which needs to be transformed into the application of artificial intelligence, 5G, and the IoT technologies.

Project Background

The People’s Hospital of Longhua Shenzhen, founded in 1976, is a public comprehensive 3A hospital integrating medical treatment, teaching, scientific research, prevention and health care. The new surgical building of the hospital has a total construction area of 102,000 square meters, with 25 floors above ground and 4 floors underground, mainly for surgical inpatients. In order to promote the upgrading of the internal logistics system of the hospital, on the basis of the original box and pneumatic logistics, the hospital introduced a number of logistics robots from Saite Intelligence to efficiently solve the problem of the hospital materials delivery at peak times.

New Solution to Ease the Hospital Logistics

-       Solutions for Pharmacy and PIVAS

The logistics distribution of oral medicine and infusion from pharmacy and PIVAS to inpatient departments is demanding in quantity, effectiveness and frequency during peak times, as well as strict in managing and tracing the various types of the medicine.

The solutions are using split robots carrying the medicine containers with adjustable height inside for the turnover boxes of different size of materials. The robots can deliver the medicines at one time from pharmacy and PIVAS to multiple units meeting the peak-time demand. The running, distribution and pickup process of the robots are all monitored and recorded, which is convenient for the hospital logistics administrators to check in real time as well as to track afterwards for problems solving and responsibility tracing if necessary.

-       Solutions for Operating Center

The operating center carriers out dozens or hundreds of operations every day, acquiring a large number of clean items, such as sterile instrument packages, high-value and low-value consumables. The nurses need to conduct the heavy work to deliver all the materials to each operating room in advance.

Considering the large size of some surgery instrument packages, the split robots with open shelf are recommended. The robots transport between the warehouse and operating rooms taking the clean passage and elevator within the operating center. Nurses only need to put the materials on the shelf, while the picking and delivering can be done autonomously by the robots.

Dual Scheduling Systems for the Safe Hospital Logistics

Robots work together through the two systems of order scheduling and traffic scheduling, to achieve the efficient and safe autonomous materials delivery in the hospitals.

The order scheduling system comprehensively consider the delivery capacity, order timeliness, priority and robot efficiency to the dispatch the suitable robots. When the robot arrives at the pick-up location, it needs to recognize the pick-up person and the item information, for ensuring the accuracy and integrity, and preventing the wrong taking.

▲Multiple Robots Collaboration

During the delivery, robots will upload the distribution process and path conditions to the traffic scheduling system, integrated with the elevator and door control systems for automatic sensing and opening, to realize the autonomous elevator taking and door opening by robots without waiting to improve the efficiency of hospital material delivery.

▲Automatic Door Opening

The intelligent algorithms can automatically plan the optimal path to avoid congestion when multiple robots work together, to keep the logistics well-organized in the hospital network. At the management level, traffic scheduling system records the robots running track and delivery time, which helps hospital analyze the materials transfer between departments, in order to optimize the storage and staff arrangement.

Future Expectation

As for now, the new surgical building of The People’s Hospital of Longhua Shenzhen has been put into use, and after the completion of the corridor leading to the internal medical building in the future, the logistics robot will play a greater role and fully cover the material distribution scene of the medical building.

The People’s Hospital of Longhua Shenzhen takes the intelligent logistics robots application as an opportunity to actively explore the transformation of hospital logistics support system. Now the hospital logistics system has taken on a new look and become more intelligent, bringing patients a better service.