The return of pneumatic tubes

By the Nineteen Sixties, pneumatic tubes have been turning into commonplace in well being care. As a hospital administrator defined within the January 1960 difficulty of Fashionable Hospital, “We are actually getting eight hours’ value of service per day from every nurse, the place beforehand we had been getting about six hours of nursing plus two hours of errand working.”

As computer systems and bank cards began to turn into extra prevalent within the Eighties, decreasing paperwork considerably, the methods shifted to principally carrying lab specimens, prescription drugs, and blood merchandise. At present, lab specimens are roughly 60% of what hospital tube methods carry; prescription drugs account for 30%, and blood merchandise for phlebotomy make up 5%.

The carriers or capsules, which might maintain as much as 5 kilos, transfer by way of piping six inches in diameter—simply large enough to carry a 2,000-milliliter IV bag—at speeds of 18 to 24 toes per second, or roughly 12 to 16 miles per hour. The carriers are restricted to these speeds to take care of specimen integrity. If blood samples transfer sooner, for instance, blood cells might be destroyed.

The pneumatic methods have additionally gone by way of main modifications in construction lately, evolving from fastened routes to networked methods. “It’s like a prepare system, and also you’re on one observe and now it’s a must to go to a different observe,” says Steve Dahl, an government vice chairman at Pevco, a producer of those methods.

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Producers attempt to get entangled early within the hospital design course of, says Swisslog’s Kwarta, so “we will speak to the scientific customers and say, ‘Hey, what sort of contents do you anticipate sending by way of this pneumatic tube system, based mostly in your mattress rely, based mostly in your affected person census, and from the place and to the place do these specimens or supplies have to go?’”

Penn Drugs’s College Metropolis Medical District in Philadelphia opened up the state-of-the-art Pavilion in 2021. It has three pneumatic methods: the principle one is for gadgets immediately associated to well being care, like specimens, and two separate ones deal with linen and trash. The primary system runs over 12 miles of pipe and completes greater than 6,000 transactions on a median day. Sending a capsule between the 2 farthest factors of the system—a distance of a number of metropolis blocks—takes just below 5 minutes. Strolling that distance would take round 20 minutes, not together with attending to the ground the place the merchandise must go.