Medicar 4.0

Hospitals in Germany are currently facing comprehensive economic, personnel, and medical challenges. These make fundamental structural changes in a wide variety of areas inevitable. One opportunity arising from this situation is the stronger use of automation and digitalization approaches to make processes more efficient in the long term and relieve the burden on staff. This applies in particular to the transport and logistics processes that support medical care, right up to the door of the patient’s room.

Unlike manufacturing companies, hospitals have so far only been able to implement machine automation solutions and the “intelligent” digitalization of processes on a selective basis. Successful machine automation in hospital operations requires, for example, an enormous degree of functional assurance for productive usability, which usually only goes as far as the hospital threshold. The research and testing of technological innovations for the “intelligent” integration of transport within the complex hospital system and with external parties through fully integrated automation and digital support of transport processes are currently impossible to achieve for individual hospitals.

To promote the automation of transport processes in hospitals, MediCar 4.0 aims to create a basis for automated cargo concepts that include e-vehicles, handling robotics, technical infrastructure components, and software systems, which will be tested on site in hospitals.