Lending a robotic hand: Baptist Health launching pilot program for robotic team member
Last month, Baptist Health introduced Moxi, the robot — its newest support member for its clinical teams.
Moxi is “intelligent, dedicated to its job, has expressive eyes and is happy to pose for selfies,” according to a Baptist Health press release.
Moxi was unveiled at a media event and demonstration on Tuesday, Oct. 4.
The press release explained the “point-to-point” robot will support clinical teams by completing time-consuming tasks that often take nurses away from their unit, including retrieving and delivering lab samples, medications, personal protective equipment (PPE), lightweight medical equipment and items left at the front desk for patients.
“What it means to [team members] is those extra steps that they take to go do those errands, to go to the pharmacy, to go to dietary and get those things,” said Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Tammy Daniel. “Moxi will do that for them so they can stay up on the unit and take care of patients instead of being off running errands. That’s exciting to them to be able to do the things that they really love to do and to know that Baptist is trying to help them do their job better.”
Baptist Health is the first health system in the state to introduce Moxi to its teams. It will conduct an eight-month pilot program deploying a pair of Moxi robots in its J.Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Tower.
“We’ll take all the data we collect from the pilot to see are there additional use cases we can use,” Daniel explained after the robot’s demonstration early last month. “We’ll take this data and extrapolate it over a year’s period of time to see how much time it saves our clinical team and then put it in use full time hopefully.”
Moxi is the product of Diligent Robotics, Inc., an Austin-based A.I. company “creating robot assistants that help healthcare workers with routine tasks so they can focus on what they do best: patient care.” Gregg Springan, head of computer formatics and a nurse himself, said it took “less than three months” from when conversations first began with Baptist Health to delivering Moxi. No new or additional hardware or infrastructure was required on behalf of Baptist Health to prepare for the pair of robots, he added, making it a “fairly light lift” to deploy the robots in the hospital halls.
“Once we’re fully live and rolled out here Moxi will be fully autonomous in Baptist Jacksonville,” he added. “We’re just getting started and making sure we’re learning all the doors and elevators; we’ll have one of our colleagues who’s here with Moxi to make sure we don’t run into any issues but over the long term, those people will go away and Moxi will be fully autonomous.”
Moxi has an arm, gripper hand and three locked drawers requiring hospital ID badges to access. Baptist Health President and CEO Michael A. Mayo said the implementation of Moxi has “multiple meanings” for the hospital.
“Utilizing a robot for delivery of point-to-point service frees our staff to be more focused on direct patient care so that the point-to-point services like delivering meals, delivering blood from the blood bank or drugs and medications from the pharmacy eliminates that task and keeps people on the unit,” he said. “Secondarily, it creates some excitement in the environment after the long pandemic and…the burnout, to have something fun and exciting in the environment.”
Funding for this initiative was made possible by the Reid Endowment for Technology at Baptist Health.
By Michele Leivas
Resident Community News
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