Beyond AI Hype: Building Trusted Hospital Robotics with Sultan Mehrabi, CEO of Relay Robotics, and Craig Anderson, Vice President of Innovation at BayCare

[00:00:02] Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket Podcast. Saul Marquez here, and I've got an opportunity to talk to you about the incredible things that are happening in care delivery and robotics today because of my two special guests. First, I want to introduce you to Sultan Mehrabi. He's the CEO of Relay Robotics. Sultan, welcome to the podcast. Sultan Mehrabi Good to be here. Thanks.

[00:00:29] David Fischel, Ph.D.: Such a pleasure to have you. And we also have Craig Anderson joining us. He's the Vice President of Innovation at BayCare. Craig, thanks for joining us. Craig Anderson, Ph.D.: It's great to be here, Saul. Thank you. David Pérez, Ph.D.: Such a pleasure to have you gentlemen here. You guys are at the forefront of innovation that makes care delivery and the business of healthcare better. So I'd love to just learn a little bit more about you guys. Tell me about you and tell me about your organizations.

[00:00:59] Craig, do you want to go first? Craig Anderson, Ph.D.: Yes, Sultan. Thank you. I'm the Vice President of Innovation here at BayCare. Been working with this mission for the last 11 years. And BayCare is a non-for-profit academic health system serving the Tampa Bay area and West Central Florida. Innovation at BayCare exists really to support our care teams, our operational teams, and find solutions in this case so they can spend more time with their patients.

[00:01:28] David Pérez, Ph.D.: Love that, Craig. Glad you could join us. Sultan. Sultan, Ph.D.: I'm the CEO of Relay Robotics. And at Relay, we have a mission of developing the best autonomous robot to make deliveries inside buildings. And the goal being to really free up humans to do work that is more valuable.

[00:01:53] And so we focus primarily on healthcare because in hospitals, we see tremendous opportunity to help. Help people who are helping other humans. So it's really amazing to see our robots doing the work they do and delivering the value to staff. And every time I go and see it, I just am blown away by how amazing it is. It makes me feel even better for doing what we do.

[00:02:19] David Pérez, Ph.D.: That's great, Sultan. And with the labor shortages, the issues with different labor laws and things like that, these robots are a big promise. And not to mention, they don't need sleep. They can work around the clock.

[00:02:35] And in a hospital where you have patients that need help around the clock, this is a big opportunity. So I would love to learn more, guys. Tell me about the partnership, how you guys came to work together and key areas where these robots are making a difference. Dr. Sultan, you want to take it first?

[00:02:52] Dr. Sultan, you want to take it first?

[00:03:16] Dr. Sultan, you want to take it first? Dr. Sultan, you want to take it first? Dr. Salman, you want to take it first?

[00:03:53] Dr. transportation. Dr. Sit над touched on, now you want to take it first. it. But Craig, what would you add to that? Sultan's got it exactly right. You know, when we look for partners for BayCare through innovation, it's about finding the solutions that can make that difference, that can drive the value for BayCare and for the customers that we serve. And also a partner that shares our values and brings solid solutions that we can depend on across the system. We're a 16 hospital system.

[00:04:23] And that has a lot of opportunity. And we've got to have the partners that can serve that opportunity at that full enterprise scale. And we saw that in Relay and Salton's team. It's been a great partnership. It's a two-way street in terms of what BayCare needs and what the robots can provide. We've developed some new use cases and some new capabilities together. Our team is very excited to share ideas. And Salton's team is great at Relay to jump right on those

[00:04:51] ideas and see if they can make them a reality. I love that, guys. Craig, I'd love to learn more about some of the use cases and including the most common ones and maybe a surprising one. Sure. So really, when we saw this opportunity, we realized in certain hospitals that we have, some are older than others. A lot of things are moved through hospitals with pneumatic tube systems. But in older hospitals, those don't exist. And in certain areas, they don't exist. And then there's

[00:05:21] also certain medicines that cannot go or lab samples that cannot go in those pneumatic tube systems. In that case, we were relying on our nursing teams to bring those down to the lab or the medicine up to the patient. And while our nurses are happy and capable to do that, their skill set is meant to be at the bedside, meant to be right there with their patients. And that's really where they want to spend

[00:05:45] their time. So looking at what Relay can do, they're experts at navigating complex hallway systems, which hospitals certainly can be. And they've got a chain of custody that really helps us understand the entire route that a sample or a medicine took. So the first use case we tackle was around the labs. Bring a lab sample down from our ICU, that's our intensive care unit floors, down to the lab.

[00:06:16] When we were asking nurses to do that, we were taking a key care team member off the floor to run that downstairs. And those are our most critical care patients. We have a nursing ratio that really keeps the nurses at the bedside. We have, you know, maybe two patients to one nurse on those floors. So we want to make sure that nurse is there to look after the sickest of our patients. Relay became

[00:06:40] a very dependable teammate for those team members up there. And our robots, Beaker and Hygieia will certainly deliver the lab samples down. We saw success there and we switched it over to pharmacy. I hadn't understood how many times we're creating those medicines downstairs in our pharmacy and running them upstairs. In the same case, we are either asking our nurses to come down and grab some of those

[00:07:03] medicines or our pharmacy techs. Our medicine creators were down there running that up to the floor. So we knew that if we could find a reliable system to do that, that both the teams downstairs in the pharmacy and our teams upstairs on the nursing floors would certainly benefit. Love those examples, Craig. Love that you also named the robots. They got names now. It was fun.

[00:07:28] Yeah, they named them and they also brand them so that you can brand them. And it's really cool because it gives them each personalities. I mean, which I think, Craig, you mentioned that the robots have one teammate of the month a couple of times. Yes, they have. They get decorated for all the holidays. They're more than just a tool. They're a trusted teammate. And like you said, Sal, they never take a day off. They're there day in and day out. They're very reliable.

[00:07:54] Wow. That's awesome. I love that. And, you know, this technology is just doing more and more each day. I mean, I was at the Miami airport, actually. And sure enough, the wheelchairs that they use for passengers, they're autonomous now. And so where we're going with this is just fantastic. I mean, if we're doing it on the roads, why can't we do it to benefit our care teams? And Craig, you know,

[00:08:20] your perspective and sort of like innovative mind, you and your team are thinking of ways to free up those teammates to work at the top of their license, as you shared, which I love. A big part of technology deployment is change management. So as you kind of think through opportunities and how teams can adopt these types of technologies, what comes top of mind as sort of tips and tricks to help deploy these robots?

[00:08:50] You hit the nail on the head with adoption. That is the key aspect of any innovation that we put forward. Will they use it? Will it drive the value? Will it stay around? And that is key to having the teams involved early. To have them as a stakeholder is one aspect of the project, but to have our teams as a partner is really where we want to start. We want to listen to how they do things today.

[00:09:15] What would they like to see solved? What are the best and worst parts of that particular process or workflow? And what would they accept? They're going to be the ones that need to use this day in and day out. So really understanding where they are today and where they want to go to in the future is critical. And our care teams, our nursing leadership are excellent partners in that way. They know what needs to be solved. And in something like this, you're looking to save each nurse a

[00:09:43] couple of minutes every hour. We have 16 hospitals. We have over 10,000 nurses. If we can save a few minutes for everybody with a solution, that really drives the value back to them. You're really creating time for that nurse to spend at the bedside, to spend with the patients. And that's really where all of our care team members want to land. And then the third part is what Sultan's team at Relay has really delivered to us. It's that reliability. They listen, they understand. If a robot has an issue

[00:10:12] that needs attention, Relay is on that within the hour to help out because they know that's a valued team member. That's part of how we do our standard methods of care today. So knowing that they can trust not only that piece of technology, that robot, but the team behind it to help make sure that that robot is getting the support it needs, adding new capabilities, doing the things that really continue to advance the value that that solution is driving for the team.

[00:10:40] Yeah, that's a good framework, Greg, to approach it. And good partnerships are a key there. Sultan, would you add anything to that? I have to say that what's been great is all the feedback from Bacon. They keep us on our toes, which is amazing. And the reliability aspect that Greg brought up is extremely important in healthcare. I mean, we have to be at like 99.8% plus kind of reliability with deliveries because

[00:11:07] 90% is not good enough. And I think one thing about why we are successful, I mean, if there are a few areas that contribute, one is we designed the whole robot ourselves and we assemble it ourselves in the US. And so our team is based here. So we're very quick to respond, but also like strategically, when we're looking at the team and expanding, we're looking at what areas location-wise people

[00:11:36] should be so that we can get to our customers quickly and make sure every robot is running. Because in healthcare, it's critical. Like reliability comes from our robotics hardware work, our software, but also from the support that we have to provide. We're proud to be great and we strive to be better. And we're really glad that we've been pushed by different things that the team

[00:12:01] at BayCare has asked us for, because that's also led to us and thinking about what else do we add and to help and so on. But making a robot really multi-floor and truly autonomous in a hospital is very difficult. I can't imagine. So we're happy with people, the hallways, the unexpecteds, like you just never know what's going to come through. Yeah. And when I hear Greg say that it's

[00:12:29] reliable, it's really great to hear that. Like that's what we want to always hear. Great feedback there. And so I've got to ask AI, everybody's talking about it. Is there anything on the robot that's AI or is there an AI sort of take here? Or is this sort of smart robotics? Like talk to us about that. So, Saul, our perspective is we like to focus on the problems that folks have and solve

[00:12:59] those. Now, if it involves using AI, great, we'll use it. But we're not out there kind of pushing AI, AI, AI. We'd rather hear someone like Greg say, hey, you're reliable, you're solving my problem, et cetera. Now, do we use AI? We use AI in very specific ways where it helps us improve performance,

[00:13:23] but we're not driven by AI usage. Got it. Cool. I have to ask, right? Because we're in that age. Everybody's using AI some way or other. Right. We also have to be careful because it's a physical product moving. You know, when we use any technology, again, that reliability in a hospital, that robot has to be reliable and safe. We're not going to experiment with things that we're not sure

[00:13:53] of stuff. But we use it very strategically in specific cases to solve problems. That's great. Craig, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that topic at all. Sure. Somewhat when you look at robotics, it is a bit of a physical embodiment of that artificial intelligence. The relay robotics are autonomous. They go from many different points. They ride the elevators by themselves. They navigate around everything. And I think that intelligence that we rely

[00:14:23] or that autonomous nature is really something that proves a lot to our teams. We have robotics in other areas of our hospital within our supply chain operations and our ORs, and we're looking at other areas. And it's really a good example with relay how accepted that autonomous nature of the robot has been, first by our care teams, second by all the other folks that are in our hospitals.

[00:14:48] And one aspect I don't ever want to leave out is it's our patients. It's their families, our true customers. They need to accept that technologies in their space of care. And they really have. They want pictures. They want selfies. They love the sounds that relay makes. We've got them wrapped as Sultan mentioned. So they look exactly like a care team member in scrubs with a stethoscope. They've got their name tags, but the technology that is the robots, it's about proving that it's

[00:15:17] accepted because it does its job. It does its well. It's very safe to use. They navigate around. They ride in the elevators with our whole staff. It's really a good match for job fit that that robot can fill that job and do a 24-7, 365. The fact that there is some intelligence behind the robots, that's really where that trust is built because a nurse will put that precious lab sample or the farm

[00:15:44] tech will put that medicine in the robot, tell it where to go. And they trust completely that the robot will complete that mission on time and that they can follow up if they need to. But they'll know every time they send it that Beaker or Hygieia will reach their destination with their precious card. That's awesome. Do you guys ever feel like you're in an episode of Star Trek?

[00:16:10] If I could teleport things, that would be amazing. We're working on that. We've got some drone projects in the works as well. I love it, guys. I love it. Well, and I did have one question because when you took me to the elevator, I'm like, so does the robot press the button where it wants to go or how's that work? No. And so we've made a lot of different design decisions, all focused on one thing, which is

[00:16:36] what is the best experience for the customer? Many years ago, we experimented with button pushing and realized that although there are some advantages to us, the customer experience is really subpar. So we integrate into the infrastructure of the hospital and that makes the performance of the robot much better for the customer, more reliable. We can do things like estimating time of arrival for a delivery because

[00:17:02] we are integrated in. So we integrate with the elevator, we operate the doors so the doors open and close as the robot needs and so on. So we don't do any button pushing because it really isn't a great experience for the hospitals over time. And we've, I think a lot of the decisions we made have proven to be really good decisions. One, for example, is the form factor. So when you're using the elevator,

[00:17:30] you don't want a big, heavy robot going into the elevator. And our robot is not big and heavy. It's light and it's very friendly. It's not intimidating. All these contribute to using an elevator well with humans. That's great. Well, I'm sure there's so much more we could unpack. The time is up today, but super fascinated and grateful that you guys came to the podcast today to share how robotics are

[00:17:58] making a difference for care delivery, for patients and the overall system. Just really grateful. If people wanted to learn more about the program or your separate programs and what you do, where can they reach out? For BayCare, they can reach out to baycare.org and they can find me at linkedin.com and or craiganderson-innovation. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Craig. And for us, it's relayrobotics.com and on LinkedIn, look me up, Sultan Mirabi and connect and I'm happy

[00:18:26] to chat always. That's brilliant. Well, I want to thank both of you for spending time with us. This was such an interesting discussion and it makes me feel hopeful for what the future of care is with these types of partnerships. For everybody listening, make sure you check out the show notes for ways to get in touch with Craig and Sultan and their respective organizations and share this episode with a friend if something resonated. Ultimately, that's how we spread the word on things that improve

[00:18:55] outcomes. Thank y'all for tuning in and we'll see you next time. Thanks, guys. Thank you.