The Challenge

In Children’s Hospital, the transportation of specimens such as blood, tissue and spinal fluids is critical. With small children and premature babies, drawing these samples is critical,” says Jerry Collins, the hospital’s Director of

Facilities Management Group. Collins says that obtaining specimens a second time because they didn’t make it to the lab in time is unthinkable.” Children’s Hospital needed a reliable pneumatic tube system (PTS) to transport these specimens quickly.

To meet this need, Children’s Hospital had Swisslog install a TransLogic PTS 320 in the early 1980s. According to Collins, prior to the installation, hospital staff manually transported critical items such as blood samples and spinal cord fluids. With the PTS, they were able to transport these items in a fraction of the time it took the courier to make the same delivery.

"The tube system performs more than half a million transactions per year…it is quite amazing that a system works that well,” Collins explains. Very few systems work under that kind of usage with little down time.” With an average of 1800 transactions per day, the primary users are laboratory, the operating room (OR), pharmacy and nursing. Traffic has grown to be very heavy, especially between lab and OR, and in the afternoons pharmacy sends out 30-40 carriers at a time,” says Collins.

The hospital began to experience moderate to heavy wait times due to an increase in system usage, an increase in hospital patients and facility expansion.

Wait time is defined as the time it takes the carrier to depart the station after the user presses the SEND button. Historically, users are satisfied with system performance if, on an overall system basis, 97 percent or more of the carriers depart the station within two minutes of pressing the station SEND button. Children’s Hospital had an approximate wait time of eight minutes in some areas. If not addressed, this wait time problem would lower user confidence in the system, causing them to rely less on it and return to manual transportation.

The Solution

Swisslog performed a System Design Analysis (SDA) to study the traffic flow, and confirm the problem, make enhancement recommendations and provide a solution. An SDA includes conducting a traffic study, making enhancement recommendations, and performing a virtual  system simulation. In the Children’s Hospital traffic study, key wait time factors were examined including volume of transactions, busy stations, distance of longest run, and traffic flow over a 24-hour time period. After the study, the wait time problem was identified and confirmed. Once the problem was identified, Swisslog sales consultants and application engineers were able to make enhancement recommendations based on the results in the traffic study.

Expansion Justified
The hospital’s traffic study revealed traffic issues and unacceptable wait times. In response, Swisslog recommended adding two new zones to the current three-zone system, and adding a second station in both pharmacy and laboratory. Multiple interzone connections were also recommended. A system simulation was performed to demonstrate how the enhancements if in place, would address the hospital’s wait time issues. After reviewing the data from the SDA, the enhancement recommendations and the system simulation, Collins took this information to the facility’s capital committee and executive team for approval.

It is much easier to get funding for improvements if you can present it on paper in black and white.” Collins added, It is hard to justify the cost when you are up against CAT scans, this study was key.” Based on the SDA results, Children’s Hospital decided to move forward on the recommended enhancements.

The Results

The system was successfully upgraded. Two new zones, multiple interzones, and thirteen new stations, including an additional station in Pharmacy and an Ultra station in Laboratory were added. Other enhancements to the system included upgrading the software to Matrix and adding 38 new user-friendly I.Q. panels.

User Confidence Increases
In June, one month after the modifications were completed, a Before and After study was performed using three days of transaction data. The Before study indicated that users within zone one regularly experienced a slight to moderate wait time problem while users in zone three regularly experienced a moderate to serious wait time problem. The After study indicated that the modifications improved overall system performance, with users in all zones experiencing no wait time problems.

With no wait time problems, user confidence grew and in turn so did system usage. At the time of the After Study, the system was processing 177 more carriers per day. More recently, the system was processing an average of 2,200 transactions per day, a 22 percent increase within a 12-month period.

What does this mean to Children’s Hospital? With the aid of an SDA, Swisslog was able to study the hospitals traffic flow, confirm problem areas and recommend solutions. With system enhancements in place, usage increased. Staff members now view their system as reliable and are confident their critical items will get to their destinations quickly.

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