AutoMed - Automation within Specialized Care

Important results from the project

AutoMed has taken a holistic approach to the development of automation solutions in healthcare with the ambition to think beyond traditional initiatives, combining excellence from Swedish healthcare (two university hospitals), industry, automation, medtech, measurement technology and gaming. Challenge was to evaluate the possibility of increased process automation within hospital wide capacity and production mgmt. Sub projects focused on robotization of support functions, such as automation of part time components in sterile engineering and increased lab automation.

Expected long term effects

Process automation: Results of the coherent visualization show, among other things, where in patient flow and how different decision support can be developed, and how patient patient waiting time and patient call measurement can be improved. Robot automation: A robotic application for repackaging unstructured surgical instruments is believed to lead to a reduction in repetitive manual work and improved ergonomics, and increase job satisfaction. Robot applications for sputum washing and stamping of agar plates are believed to lead to a decrease in repetitive data.

Approach and implementation

Process Automation: An important component for developing the analysis tool is access to a well-defined patient flow. The result led to an attempt to define patient flow for a specific diagnosis group. Robot automation: In the sterile business, improvements in robot performance are necessary for the application to be used in production. The lab applications show that the data can be performed by a YuMi. Some further development is required for production use.