Sengkang General Hospital (SKH)

In the bustling corridors of Sengkang General Hospital (SKH), a new team of helpers is on the job. These are the Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), a technology silently transforming the hospital's logistical backbone and, in the process, freeing up valuable human hands to do what they do best: care for patients.

SKH plays a vital role in providing quality and accessible care to better serve the healthcare needs in North-Eastern Singapore, offering a wide spectrum of specialist clinics, delivering multi-disciplinary and patient-centric care covering all major healthcare disciplines.

SKH's vision is "Healthy Living. Fulfilling Life," which emphasises holistic well-being and patient-oriented healthcare. To align with this vision and deliver efficient, safe, and community-oriented care, especially amidst the strain of Singapore's aging population, SKH extensively adopted advanced automation and smart-facility solutions.

Before the deployment of autonomous mobile robots, SKH identified opportunities to improve its manual transport operations due to their high frequency and resource requirements.

Nurses and support staff dedicated part of their time to routine transport tasks. Medication and surgical instrument trolleys – each had to be manually pushed and pulled across multiple floors and departments. Food and linen were manually transferred from Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) trolleys, located at a distance, to smaller trolleys that required both nurses and support staff to deliver them by hand closer to patient areas.

Skilled clinical staff performing transport duties presented an opportunity to optimise resource allocation. The heavy manual workload contributed to staff fatigue and operational pressures. During peak hours, it affected workflow efficiency, and in non-peak times, with reduced staffing, delivery schedules could be impacted.  

This manual transportation model had room for improvement in terms of operational efficiency and reducing preparation times between procedures. With the anticipated growth in healthcare demand from an aging population and workforce considerations, the hospital recognised an opportunity to optimise its transportation system.

To address these operational needs, SKH implemented AMRs as it aligned well with its smart facility goals to streamline staff workflows, optimise logistics, and harness data-driven operations.

The AMRs are equipped with intelligent, trackless navigation. The robots use an array of advanced sensors to dynamically navigate hospital corridors. This eliminated the need for costly and major infrastructure changes.

"We needed a solution that was agile and could integrate with our existing systems," explains Teng Jyh Lei, Deputy Director of Strategic Projects at SKH. "The AMR’s ability to connect Robotics Middleware for Healthcare (RoMi-H) was a game-changer and opens up the possibility that similar AMRs can operate in a centralised control platform that manages every door and lift in the hospital.”

The deployment, which began in early 2024 and completed in September 2025, involves a total fleet of 37 MiR250s across four core operational workflows. These tireless AMRs work around the clock, handling a variety of critical tasks and taking over the manual effort of pushing carts:

Operating Theatres: The AMRs ensure a seamless flow of sterile equipment for surgeries by delivering contaminated instruments after surgery for sterilisation at the Central Sterile Services Unit (CSSU) and delivering sterilised instruments back to the operating theatre facilities.

Pharmacy: The AMRs deliver patient medications from the pharmacy to the wards.

Meal Delivery: The AMRs deliver patient meals into the wards during scheduled mealtimes.

Linen: The AMRs deliver clean linen to the wards.

While the overall strategy is planned by management, the real story of the AMRs is in the day-to-day lives of the staff who work alongside them.

In the Operating Theatres: For operating theatre nurses who are responsible for preparing surgical instruments, the change has been profound. Previously, they had to manually push heavy instrument carts long distances from the operating rooms to designated areas for decontamination, often making multiple trips. This required significant physical effort and redirected time that could be better spent on patient care and operating theatre turnover. Now, they simply activate an AMR with a tablet, which takes on the physical demands of transport. "This means less rushing and less stress for the nurses," an operating theatre nurse says. "With the extra time and reduced pressure, we can perform our tasks more efficiently and safely, ultimately improving both the quality of our work and patient safety."

In the Pharmacy: The pharmacy department has deployed AMRs to handle the transport of medications. This has had a direct impact on efficiency and accuracy. "We use it to transport medications to the ward, which, in turn, has reduced our reliance on human porters," a pharmacy technician explains. "AMRs reduce the rate of human errors during transportation, providing timely deliveries, careful handling, and accurate routing to designated locations." The new process also streamlines the workflow for pharmacy technicians, who no longer need to manually enter jobs into a portering portal or coordinate with human porters, thereby reducing workflow disruptions. With AMRs, pharmacy technicians can create the job, load the AMR, and dispatch it once the medications are loaded, before returning to create and assign jobs to the next available AMR.

In the Wards: A nurse at the wards, describes how AMRs for food and linen delivery have changed her daily routine. Before the AMRs, pushing trolleys was a time-consuming and physically demanding task. Now, the AMRs handle the transport, delivering food on scheduled timings, which has a ripple effect on patient comfort and care. "The timely delivery of hot food improves patient comfort and satisfaction," she says. "We now spend less time walking and pushing trolleys and have more time that can be redirected toward other tasks, ultimately allowing us to allocate more time for patient interaction and preparation rather than logistics."

While it's too early for a full ROl report, the qualitative benefits are already clear. "We introduced AMRs to automate routine processes to allow our clinical teams to focus on patient-centred care," said Charity Wai, Chief Operating Officer from SKH. "At the same time, this has also enabled our Operations team to improve operational efficiency and strengthen resilience to meet future demands."

“The AMRs streamlined and automated our hospital workflows, reducing our reliance on manpower and also creating the opportunity for scalable efficiency across the whole hospital.”

SKH is the first in Singapore to deploy such a large fleet of MiR robots, representing a significant development in healthcare logistics automation within the country. The outcome of this project illustrates how automation can enhance healthcare operations, showing that effective technology solutions can enable staff to focus more on patient-centred care.