Counting Nurse Walking Hours Before a Delivery Robot Decision

Does a delivery robot actually return nursing hours?

It can, but the number on a vendor slide is not your number. Before any delivery robot decision, count the walking your own nurses and pharmacy staff do, trip by trip, then convert that count into hours and dollars.

BayCare Health offers a useful test case. On June 3, 2026, Relay Robotics announced that two robots, Stork and Miles, had been deployed at Winter Haven Hospital and Winter Haven Women's Hospital. The release says the robots are projected to complete 500-plus deliveries per month and to save an estimated 150-plus clinical hours per month, collectively. That is a projection from the vendor, not a measured result.

What the 150-plus hours figure does and does not say

The claim has three soft spots. It is projected rather than measured. It is stated for the two robots collectively, so it says nothing about any single nurse, shift or floor. And it sits beside other Relay figures that do not match it: a general claim of over 150 hours per month for hospitals using Relay robots, an older web page listing 150-plus hours saved per hospital, and a BayCare case study citing 600-plus hours saved per month across four robots at three hospitals. Those figures are not interchangeable, and the sources do not show how each was calculated.

BayCare has also said it plans to measure time savings down to the minute on a different robot, a stretcher-guiding unit called Rovi, and to test whether the savings justify the investment, according to Florida Trend. That is a useful model for checking any hospital's numbers, even though it is not a result for the Relay units.

How do you build a walk log that holds up?

Run the log for about two weeks so the sample covers weekday and weekend patterns, every shift and at least one high-volume day. Self-logging drifts, so have a second observer shadow a few hours on each shift and compare notes against the log.

For every trip, record:

• Role (nurse, pharmacy technician, pharmacist or other)
• Origin and destination unit or room
• Reason for the trip: specimen, medication, supplies or other
• Departure and arrival times, to the minute
• Whether the trip could have been combined with another errand

How do trips become hours?

Start with trips per month. Take the logged trips in your sample, divide by the sample days, then multiply by the number of working days in a month. Keep nursing and pharmacy separate, because their routes and loaded wages will differ.

Then estimate minutes returned per trip. Walking time is not the whole saving. A robot still needs staff to load, send, receive and unload, and badge access may add a step. Subtract that handling time from the walking time. Monthly hours returned equals trips per month times net minutes per trip, divided by 60, summed across roles.

How do you turn those hours into dollars?

Use the loaded hourly cost for each role from your own payroll: base wage plus your agreed share of payroll taxes and benefits. Multiply each role's hours by its loaded rate and add the results. Do not borrow a regional average when your payroll already has the figure.

Count only time that becomes usable. Four minutes that a nurse spends waiting for an elevator is not four minutes of patient care. Value the hours that move into patient-facing work, reduce overtime or avoid an unfilled shift, and report the rest as unquantified. A public job posting is a weak substitute for payroll. One BayCare Winter Haven Nurse Helper posting lists $13.75 to $15.75 per hour, a single listed range rather than a wage benchmark, so use your own records instead.

How do you test the vendor claim against your floor?

Divide the vendor's figures and see what they imply. Dividing 150 hours by 500 deliveries gives 0.3 hours, or about 18 minutes, of clinical time returned per delivery. If your walk log shows that a typical trip removes a few minutes of walking, the projection implies far more saving per delivery than your floor supports. That gap is the question to take into the vendor meeting, not proof that the claim is wrong.

Ask for the calculation, the baseline before deployment, the delivery count behind the 500, whether any of those deliveries would have been made by staff anyway, and the time basis for each saved minute. Relay's own timeline is a point to check as well: the release describes a typical hospital deployment that takes about 12 weeks including floor mapping and staff training, so build that schedule into your own comparison.

Where does a robot lease fit once the numbers are clear?

Service Robot Co. is an OEM-neutral integrator. We select robots across manufacturers, and we lease them to customers through financing on a 3-year lease with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. The walk log in this method becomes the baseline for that assessment, so the hours and dollars you calculate feed directly into the quote.

Vendors also differ in what they do. A market report lists Diligent Robotics as adding manipulation for collecting items without a fixed loading station, and Relay as focused on protected small-item delivery with elevator access. Match the robot to your routes, not to the largest headline figure.