Originally designed for a factory job manipulating nuts and bolts, Robby has a new career in medicine these days, working in the clinical laboratory at Loyola University Medical Center.
Robby, a machine that sorts and processes hundreds of blood samples daily, makes decisions complex enough to earn his nickname from human workers, who often refer to the robot as “he” instead of “it.”
Loyola installed Robby late last month at its main laboratory in Maywood, serving as the North American beta test site for a new piece of equipment that Beckman Coulter Inc., a California lab systems firm, hopes to introduce commercially to hospitals late this year.
If the robotic system is as good as hoped at freeing humans from tedious–and sometimes hazardous–repetitive lab tasks, it could save Loyola $200,000 a year in operating costs, said George Krempel, Loyola’s administrative director of clinical laboratories and pathology.
The robotic lab table, which will sell for about $500,000, is typical of the hospital industry’s drive to find new ways to use automation to cut costs. Despite widespread use of high-tech equipment in health care, medicine’s conservative nature often has kept the industry from rapidly adopting manufacturing technology to its own uses.
Even though machines already do most of the actual chemistry to perform blood tests ordered by physicians at large medical centers like Loyola, preparing specimens for automated analysis has remained labor-intensive.
With the new robotic system, lab technologists can label glass test tubes containing blood and place them into a tray within reach of the robotic arm. The robot lifts each tube, reads its bar code and consults the hospital’s central computer to determine what tests are needed.
The robot then decides what kind of preparation the blood sample needs–if the blood must be separated in a centrifuge before analysis, for example. Robby puts each tube in an appropriate tray and later places the trays into machines for processing.
It’s simple, boring work, but it must be done accurately.
“This isn’t exactly `Star Wars’ technology,” said Hung Bui, program manager for Beckman, based in Fullerton, Calif. “We adapted a robotic arm designed for manufacturing, something that might pick up nuts and bolts or manipulate a circuit board.
“Hospital automation today is still in an early phase, and it’s evolving as we learn more how to integrate current technology into existing problems and how hospital practices might change to become more efficient.”
Other, more complicated automated systems for processing lab specimens require installing tracks on the laboratory floor and setting up an assembly line, Bui said. Beckman supplies such systems, but they cost millions of dollars and are more appropriate for centralized labs that process huge volumes than for a medical center like Loyola, which handles about 1,000 specimens each day.
Robby uses technology that already exists at Loyola, notably the hospital’s bar code system, which lets computers track medical cases. As soon as a patient’s doctor orders a blood test, for instance, the instructions and patient identification are entered into a computer, and a printer near the patient’s room produces a bar-code sticker to be placed on the vial containing the blood sample.
The robot works from the bar code; indeed, Robby’s attention to detail and tracking every single test tube it encounters can startle its human attendants.
“He’s extremely logical and knows where every tube is,” said Marianne Rider, who operates Robby. “If you take a tube out of its tray for some reason, you have to tell him or else he’ll just keep looking for his baby. It takes a little getting used to, because these other machines don’t have that kind of intelligence.”
This robotic single-mindedness can be a real advantage when it’s necessary to find a particular vial among the hundreds being handled in the lab on any given day, said Cindy Blakemore, manager of Loyola’s clinical lab.
“Sometimes when a physician gets results from the tests he’s ordered, he wants new tests done,” Blakemore said. “Our robot knows just where every tube is and can find any specimen right away. Without him, we’d have to go around looking.”
Besides reducing the tedium and complexity of keeping track of so many containers of human fluids, the robot also offers a safety measure: It uncaps each vial as part of its preparation of the specimen for analysis. When a test tube’s lid comes off, the change in air pressure can cause a mist of blood to spray outward, so having a robot do it “protects the staff from the release of any hazardous aerosol inside the test tubes,” said Krempel, the lab’s administrative director.
Loyola’s acquisition of the robotic system interests staff members from other hospital labs, and it was something of a tourist attraction earlier this month, when the American Association for Clinical Chemistry held its annual meeting in Chicago.
Many chemists and lab administrators trekked to Maywood from McCormick Place to view Robby in action.
“It’s just fascinating,” said Margaret Lamb, lab director of the Craven Regional Medical Center in New Bern, N.C.
Even though her lab handles less than half as many specimen samples daily as does Loyola, the volume is still enough to make automation attractive, she said.
“This would free up our technologists to do the thinking they’re trained for instead of spending so much time just spinning tubes,” Lamb said. “There may be a big cost at the front end, but I can definitely see that he’d be a real asset to our lab.”
