From Hospital Logistics to Patient Transport: Where Robotics Can Help Most with Spencer Krause, President and CEO of SKA Robotics

[00:00:04] Welcome to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. We are here at DeviceTalks Boston continuing to have great conversations with amazing leaders from our class industry. And today I'm joined by Spencer Krause. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, so thank you so much. Thank you, Alexis. We really appreciate the opportunity. Of course. For those who are listening in and tuning in, Spencer, I'm wondering if you can tell them a little bit about yourself, your background, and what brings you to DeviceTalks today.

[00:00:30] Absolutely. So I'm the President and CEO of SK Robotics. We do field robotics across a variety of industries, including mining, construction, agriculture, and most importantly for DeviceTalks, healthcare. Yeah. So we've actually worked on two hospital logistics robots, a surgical robot, a handheld medical device, and a cross-thesis. Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about sort of this cross-industry experience that you and your teams have, plus this healthcare specialization.

[00:00:56] And sort of like, how are you navigating the future of robotics and where are you putting more weight or more stock? Absolutely. Our mission is to automate jobs for what can't, shouldn't, or don't want to do. So in healthcare, that looks a lot like moving garbage around, you know, the sub-basements and hospitals or moving controlled medications in a way where they just can't be tampered with. Well, hospital transport is a really understaffed field right now. And that's kind of what that looks like in healthcare.

[00:01:20] There's a lot of lessons that translate across industry. I mean, I guess I can bore you guys with the engineering side or I can talk more about the political and the corporate landscape side. I guess what would be more interesting for your listeners? Yeah. I'm kind of curious about the political and kind of corporate landscape side. I mean, particularly in healthcare, I think I see from my own experience, there's a lot of excitement of robotics about what it can do, about the burden it can decrease for clinicians, but also some of the administrative side, like you said.

[00:01:49] But I also see this hesitation, this fear, and I'm wondering if that's what you're getting at with the political side of things. I think that exists in every industry. So, I mean, when we introduce a new robot into like a mine, for instance, we have to contend with people who take their jobs. Really, it's just getting to know stakeholders on all levels. It's the C-suite, it's the operators, it's the maintenance managers, it's the workers themselves. The messaging is different at all levels. So, I mean, I would say at the highest level, it's about kind of the media implications of, hey, this is a really positive thing.

[00:02:16] You're going to be pioneers in this area. And also, it's risk mitigation. You don't want to be in the news for bad things. You do want to be in the news for good things. A lot of it's about cost mitigation and savings. There's deficiency. And then I would say at like the user side, a lot of it's about like this will keep you safer. It's going to make your job more fulfilling and interesting. It'll free you up to do the parts of your job you actually enjoy and get you away from the drudgery and the dangerous parts for people, fire workers, compensation claims all the time. Totally.

[00:02:42] I guess on the healthcare side in particular, there's some interesting incumbents to overcome. So this is maybe not the most glamorous thing, but one of them is IT. If all people, to get a robot onto a hospital systems network is a multi-month process. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, and you can't, a lot of times what we do in our outdoor industries that we're involved in and field robotic appointments is we'll use like cellular modems to get around that. But you can't do that in a hospital. Yeah. There's so much mock. Yeah. And when you're surrounded by concrete and steel, so there's no way to get that signal. Yeah.

[00:03:12] So you have to work those channels and go through that. Another interesting hospital design consideration and is HIPAA, obviously. So a lot of robots navigate by camera, but I mean, with HIPAA, first off, there's a perception that even if the camera is not capturing people's faces or identities, like people are worried that it might be. And this is clinical staff and patients. I would say it's very similar to GDPR in Europe. So you can't capture the public there either, but it's similar outcome, different reason. Yeah. Yeah. How are you navigating that? That's a great question. I'm glad you asked.

[00:03:42] So what I would say is there's a few different strategies. So our client, Athan, used to put in all of their robots and they're like the largest possible logistics robot manufacturer in the world, by the way. And they used to put in all their robots, non-camera sensors. So I'm talking like sonar, infrared, imaging, sorry, infrared ranging, different things of that nature. And their CEO here, who's a very good friend of mine, would kind of pitch that like, hey, the robot doesn't even have a camera. So I capture you. That's one way of doing it.

[00:04:08] More modern perception algorithms are trending in the direction of cameras. And you can just do a lot more with a camera now. So our other client, Rovex Technologies Corporation, which is an autonomous patient transport robot company, their approach is a bit different. So they're using the most modern sensors. They're using cameras. Athan's using cameras too right now in their new products. Not in all of them. With that, you have to have on-edge algorithms that can detect people's faces and blur them out automatically. Or very secure data storage means that can form to health care specific standards. Got you.

[00:04:36] So it's almost like these robots are going around the hospital system, but they're not retaining any of the data that could ever be. And does that apply to like name tags and things like that as well? Yeah, you have to boil that out. Name tags, faces, like what room a patient is going to, anything that could be used. I'm not a hospital informatics expert, so forgive me if I get any of this wrong. But my understanding is, yeah, you have to blur out anything that could be identifying your patient at all. Yeah. Interesting. So I'm curious, what other challenges are you navigating?

[00:05:02] Or maybe nuances are you navigating, kind of bringing the future of robotics to health care? Absolutely. So I would say, I mean, there's the engineering challenges. That's a big one. So I guess sterilization is another one. So from that perspective, making things that can be cleaned down like frequently and easily hosed down is a big requirement. In terms of adoption, you've got to get buy-in from a bunch of different stakeholders. But I kind of covered that already. I said I'll belabor that point too much. Maybe I'll talk about surgical a bit because I talked about where you guys are. It's okay, sure.

[00:05:32] So on the surgical side, there's some really interesting new advancements going on. I've only ever worked on one surgical robot, so experience is a little bit limited. But in that, I know a big concern was operator error. And so designing a system that can't be steered into a place where it would do damage to the patient's anatomy. And in terms of this surgical robotics, what area is it in? Is it orthopedics? Is it neurology? Ortho. So when you're using a robot to do a surgery, there are certain things that you can do that you just wouldn't be able to do by hand.

[00:06:02] And so some of the features, while I can't really go into detail on what they are, take advantage of the, we'll say, the strengths of robotics in order to enable greater force multiplication of the surgery. Okay, awesome. Awesome. And I guess I'm curious, where do you see healthcare as a whole in terms of being tech enabled and really like accelerating and advancing in terms of robotics? Are you getting a lot of hesitation on terms of costs or some of the logistics that you mentioned? Like, where is that?

[00:06:31] I'm almost thinking like a speedometer in my mind. Where is healthcare, especially since you have experience in other industries? Well, I think healthcare has always been pretty tech forward. I mean, there's a slow sales cycle, which can be a little bit challenging. I mean, it's my experience. And we don't sell directly to hospital systems, but our clients, they do tell us it's about like an 18 to 24 month sales cycle typically. Makes sense, yeah. So that's challenging. I mean, you've got to overcome a lot of regulatory hurdles. So we have put things through FDA. Obviously, there's a lot of caveats and hurdles to overcome there.

[00:06:58] I guess what I will say, though, is hospitals aren't afraid to spend money where they perceive there to be actual value. So I think that's kind of an awesome thing. I mean, doctors tend to like having the latest and greatest tools at their disposal. So they're very tech forward in that way. And then I know a lot of physicians who are also researchers who are just tech nerds and early adopters. So it's been good. I would say I could talk about other sectors, too, and like the relative rates that are up in the world. Commining is a late adopter. Like, I would say their tech is probably 10 to 20 years out of date of the state of the art.

[00:07:28] Hospitals are an early adopter. Like, their tech is maybe five years behind academia. Okay. And then, no, that's the gold standard. But that's where the new ideas come from. Yeah. Makes sense. And then I would say oil and gas, maybe 10 years behind. So like a little bit faster than mine, a little bit slower than hospitals. They have more money. Yeah. Yeah. Agriculture is just doing poorly right now. Always right. Yeah. You would think that would be an area where robotics is so needed. I'm just thinking of rising temperature levels.

[00:07:55] And I think I read an article last year that was saying that a lot of farmers are switching to night farming in the summer just due to heat levels, blow, blow, and do it. Yeah. So you would think that would be, hopefully, agriculture can kind of get ahead on the robot. Oh, so agriculture, I guess I'll take back what I said. So agriculture kind of comes in waves with how all the industry is doing. Right now they're in a down cycle. But it's a cyclical industry. One of my unofficial advisors is Seth Crawford, the former chairman of the board of PTX Trimble. Yeah. Really sharp guy.

[00:08:21] He was influential in John Deere creating their connected tractor program. So it used to be that in order to connect a John Deere tractor, you had to pay extra money on a monthly subscription. Seth lobbied really hard to get every connector, every tractor, sorry, every tractor connected effectively for free as part of a vehicle. And what that allowed was them to do better preventative maintenance. Their parts departments made more money. They had better insights if somebody would phone in that when engine oil is faulty, they'd say, well, you didn't change the oil.

[00:08:48] And they could also provide better service because they could get ahead of problems and get up to their customers with them. And they had better analytics. They could do better marketing. For sure. So that big, big deal. And Deere's always been on the cutting edge with ag in addition to some other companies. And I would say like Caterpillar is similar in like the mining sector and also in the ag space and the all sorts of line of ours. Yeah. I love that. That's great. That's really cool. I love when you see multiple industries coming together, especially in healthcare. We were talking about how you see that so rarely.

[00:09:15] I mean, you hear people talk about all the time, like healthcare should learn from other industries. Why can't healthcare be like Amazon and so consumer friendly? But this genuinely feels like a true intersection of multiple industries also being able to make progress in healthcare, which is great. Absolutely. I mean, you just take the ideas that work and you broker them from where you've seen them work to where they don't know about them yet. Yeah. And 18 to 24 months later, maybe it'll get to a hospital system. Amen. That's great. I wonder, I always to say on these episodes with folks, I know you have your own podcast.

[00:09:45] Absolutely. There's lots of places where people can kind of tune in, follow, listen, stay tuned for updates. So I want to ask you, are there any things that you want to tease in terms of stay tuned for what people should watch for going into the second half of this year? And or where can people go to learn more about what you do, the products, all that good stuff? Absolutely. So if you're in the market for advanced field robotics engineering services, I'm talking best in the world, top 1% engineering talent. Check out SKI Robotics. SKI Robotics.com is the easiest place to find us, but you can also follow us on LinkedIn.

[00:10:15] If you enjoyed hearing me speak and want to hear more of that, check out Collaborative of Spencer Krause. Video.spencerkrause.com links to our YouTube channel, but we're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Radio Public, and YouTube. So check us out. Collaborative of Spencer Krause, again, is the name of that podcast. You can find me on the Robot Report podcast as well. I talk about why hardware is the new engineering frontier. And thank you for listening. We really appreciate it. Yeah, awesome. Thank you all so much. We will add links and everything clickable in the show notes. Make sure you go there. Stay tuned.

[00:10:44] Follow Spencer for sure. And I just want to say thank you so much for doing the episode. Appreciate it. Thanks.