April 12, 2022 – A Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Medical Center participated in a $30 million funding round for service robot startup Diligent Robotics.
Diligent Robotics created Moxi, a robot that performs delivery tasks for frontline healthcare teams. Stress and burnout have been a persistent problem in healthcare for years, creating a shortage of nurses and clinical staff. But over the past two years COVID-19 has accelerated this into a crisis moment, with projections of more than 1 million new nurses needed in the U.S. alone. More and more health systems are looking for automation to provide workforce augmentation at a critical time for this market.
Founded in 2017, Diligent Robotics is the leading company in the social robotics space and the first to build a unique robot with social intelligence and mobile manipulation capabilities to help people in their work environments. In 2018, the company debuted Moxi, a collaborative robot assistant that assists clinical staff with routine, not-patient-facing tasks including fetching and delivering supplies, medications, or lab samples. Since launching and integrating into several healthcare systems, Moxi demonstrated improvement in overall clinical flows and gave care team members back valuable time to spend with their patients.
“Diligent Robotics’ participation in the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program led to the exploration of our team testing this solution with our clinical teams,” said David Marshall, MD, chief nursing executive of Cedars-Sinai. “Using the robot to relieve front line healthcare workers from point-to-point delivery and retrieval tasks has been successful in our original launch. Staff members have told me that gives them more time for direct patient care.”