Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2023 - 11

FROM EXPERIENCE / ROUNDS
The future
of staffing
Health care robots relieve
workers of simple duties.
BY BRIAN BUSENBARK
I
t has only been a few months since
chief transformation and digital officer
Omkar Kulkarni onboarded a new robot.
Moxi assists the pharmacy technicians at
Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA)
with some of their day-to-day functions,
and everyone on the team is already
impressed. " Moxi has been tremendously
helpful, " says Christopher Li, pharmacy
supervisor at CHLA. " Nurses and medical
assistants can now focus on patient care
and higher-level tasks. "
CHLA's robotic journey began in 2019
when Kulkarni's team reached across the
organization seeking to identify operational
pain points for its employees. The
hospital's pharmacy director pointed
out the inefficiencies of having pharmacy
technicians walking
medications across CHLA's
campus and proposed
using a specially designed
health care robot assistant
for this task.
Enter Moxi, a 4-foottall,
300-pound robot that
travels between CHLA's
pharmacy and patient
floors fulfilling medication
requests 24 hours a day. In
two and a half months, Moxi has made
more than 1,400 deliveries, traveled 73
miles and saved staff 900 hours.
Carol Taketomo, PharmD, chief phar " STAFF
CAN
in delivering meds helps the staff to
recoup 20 to 30 minutes per delivery, "
she says. Among other tasks, that extra
time allows pharmacy staff to work on
new orders, stat doses, compound oral
medications, and prepare
complex, high-risk
medications.
Kulkarni says the hosNOW
FOCUS ON
PATIENT CARE AND
HIGHER-LEVEL
TASKS. "
pital's lease agreement for
its two robots amounts
to a per-hour cost lower
than full-time employees
performing the same
duties-so CHLA is seeing
an immediate return on
its financial investment.
And that ROI doesn't take into account
the message it sends to the hospital's
staff members.
" This is a great example of how we are
macy officer, says Moxi has relieved foot
pain for employees who previously had
to deliver medication, enabled service to
continue during staff breaks, and made
operations more efficient and productive,
especially at night when fewer
employees are working. " Moxi's support
ensuring our team members are able to do
their best work at the top of their skillset, "
Kulkarni says. " Our nursing leaders and
pharmacy team are appreciative that
we're investing in this kind of technology. "
The investment is paying off with
patients and their families as well, as
Moxi has made
more than 1,400
deliveries in less
than three months.
Moxi rapidly becomes a fixture of CHLA's
culture. " Here's this giant robot toy that
moves and beeps and is kind of a sci-fi
thing running around the hospital-it's
bringing joy to these kids, " Kulkarni says.
CHLA is still in the early stages of
understanding Moxi's capabilities and
how best to deploy the robots to further
ease staff workload burdens. In assessing
the broader pediatric health care landscape,
Kulkarni foresees a larger role for
robot technology on the horizon.
" We're always going to have a limited
amount of highly qualified, highly skilled
people who can provide important clinical
care for our patients, " Kulkarni says.
" And there's always going to be a lot of
kids who need to be seen and not enough
people to take care of them-so whether
it's robots or other forms of automation,
we've got to figure out ways to leverage
technology to bridge the gap. "
Brian Busenbark is a writer and content
strategist in Omaha, Nebraska.
Tell your hospital's story. Email
magazine@childrenshospitals.org.
CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS TODAY Spring 2023
11
Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2023

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