Bedestrian's Healthcare Pilot

Roots in Healthcare. Broad Applications.

We founded Bedestrian with an idea: By scaling down autonomous vehicle technology, we could automate menial tasks in hospitals and let medical staff focus on higher-value, specialized tasks.

Background

Hospitals in particular have struggled with labor shortages and rising costs that threaten their ability to provide high-quality care. As a result, many have been forced to use highly trained medical staff to perform low-skilled, manual labor. It triggers a downward spiral of staff burnout, lower quality of care and operational inefficiency that put them on an unsustainable path. 

So by automating delivery and other tasks, we could alleviate staffing shortages and free up healthcare professionals to perform at the top of their licensure and certification. 

What We Learned

The organizational hierarchy at large acute-care hospitals quickly championed our pilot technology — and we discovered just how large and complex the logistical operations of a major health system really are. Providing healthcare is just one of many industries layered on top of one another: real estate development, pharmaceutical distribution, commercial-grade food prep and distribution, factory laundry facilities, and medical device and equipment warehousing. 

Yet hospital operations are often a patchwork of archaic solutions: 1950s vacuum tubes; handwritten paper trails; wheeled carts taking up valuable real estate in hallways; and hoarded supplies and IV poles, resulting in higher costs for overbuying and overstocking.

Healthcare leaders are looking to technology as a starting point to solve the many problems they confront, as we explain in the video below.