SilverWing Medical Unveils Integrated Storage-Distribution-Transport Smart Logistics Solution Amid Surge in 'Medical New Infrastructure'

China’s healthcare resources are characterized by insufficiency, inequity, and suboptimal quality, with these contradictions becoming particularly pronounced during the pandemic.

In response, the 14th Five-Year Plan emphasizes the development of high-quality medical resources and their balanced regional distribution, clarifies the dominant role of public medical institutions, strengthens the comprehensive capabilities of medical centers, and further increases the supply of high-quality medical service resources. This initiative will usher in a new cycle of medical institution construction from 2021 to 2025, leading to a rapid increase in the number of medical institutions in China.

“New Healthcare Infrastructure” Is Timely, and Healthcare Reform Policies Are Continuously Being Implemented. Medical Institutions Will Increasingly Pursue Lean Operations as Their Goal, Leveraging Digitalization, Process Standardization, and Automation to Achieve Closed-Loop Smart Management Across the Entire Healthcare System.

As a logistics system that provides comprehensive support for hospital management, medical services, and patients, smart transformation has also become an imperative agenda item.Building a smart hospital logistics system has become a key component of modern hospital digitalization within the “New Healthcare Infrastructure” initiative.

This indicates that the field of smart hospital logistics is filled with unmet needs and vast market potential, with penetration rates expected to rise steadily. In response, Silver Wing Medical, a provider of comprehensive intelligent hospital logistics solutions with 15 years of deep industry expertise, has taken the lead in delivering its answer.

At the third session of the “Air Salon on Promoting Smart Development of Hospital Logistics,” hosted by the China Primary Health Care Foundation and supported by the Hospital Building Systems Research Branch of the Chinese Hospital Association,Silver Wing Innovatively Proposes the "Integrated Storage, Distribution, and Transportation System" Smart Hospital Logistics Solution, empowering hospitals to achieve high-quality smart development.

Logistics Transmission System

The rapid advancement of information technology has significantly enhanced the automation level of logistics transmission systems, propelling the logistics industry into a new era of development. Due to its ability to substantially improve efficiency and reduce labor costs, its applications have gradually expanded into the healthcare sector.

The core function of the hospital logistics transmission system is to serve as an automated, rapid transit channel for various daily medical supplies within the hospital. By employing different types of logistics transmission systems, it can transport small items such as medications, small medical devices, documents, specimens, blood, blood samples, X-ray films, dressings, prescriptions, and office supplies, as well as medium-sized or bulkier items such as IV fluids, meal carts, and medical waste.

However, in the hospital setting, internal logistics are characterized by high transportation demand, a wide variety of materials, stringent safety requirements, strict time constraints, rigorous infection prevention and control measures, and a high need for traceability in material management. As hospitals continue to expand in scale, the challenges associated with traditional warehousing and material delivery within these facilities have become increasingly severe.

On the one hand, there are many pain points in traditional hospital warehouse management.：

Accompanying these issues are the year-on-year rise in warehousing costs and the continuous decline in work efficiency. In hospitals where “a bed is hard to find,” how to maximize the utilization of on-site storage space while simultaneously meeting flexible storage demands has become a critical issue in hospital warehousing operations.

On the other hand, traditional in-hospital logistics services are essentially labor-intensive, which entails certain drawbacks.. Hospitals experience high daily foot traffic, and due to their specialized nature, their internal circulation systems differ significantly from those of other public buildings, with complex horizontal and vertical circulation organization within the facility.

For instance, in terms of personnel flow, there are healthy individuals (medical staff and others), patients, and critically ill patients; in terms of material flow, a distinction is made between clean and contaminated items. Improper organization of internal hospital pathways and disjointed spatial sequences can lead to congestion, increase the risk of cross-infection, and may even delay emergency patient care.

In addition, most hospitals lack automated material transport systems; logistics still rely primarily on manual carts and labor. The inability to fully separate logistical pathways from pedestrian traffic increases the risk of disease transmission and hinders effective control of healthcare-associated infections.

Meanwhile, reliance on manual transport entails continuous cost increases; hospitals must employ large transportation teams and devote significant resources to personnel management. Moreover, manual transport times are inconsistent, resulting in low operational efficiency.

As hospital patient volumes rise, traditional manual warehousing and logistics can no longer meet customer demands, making it imperative to enhance the safety and efficiency of transportation. Therefore, by integratingDigitalization, AutomationSmart logistics technologies, with the integrated model of “storage, distribution, and transportation,” will generally improve the current state of hospital logistical supply management.

Since 2007, Silver Wing Medical has been providing intelligent material management solutions for hospitals, making it one of the earliest companies to enter this industry in China. Silver Wing Medical has continuously explored and led the industry. The "Integrated Storage, Distribution, and Transportation" solution is an innovative intra-hospital smart logistics proposal put forward by Silver Wing Medical after deepening and refining over a decade of industry experience, based on the current needs and status of smart hospital logistics management.

In terms of warehouse space expansion, Silver Wing Medical has adopted intensive architectural functions to ensure that materials from various hospital departments are stored as uniformly as possible in the central hospital warehouse, thereby allocating more building space for diagnostic and treatment needs.

Meanwhile, Silver Wing Intelligent Solutions Medical Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. integrates an intelligent warehousing system through its software platform to centrally manage hospital supplies, thereby achieving a smart upgrade in the “intelligent management of access, allocation, and traceability” of hospital supplies, along with networked information interaction.

Typically, the hospital’s central warehouse is primarily responsible for procurement, goods receipt, write-offs, returns, and master data maintenance of medical consumables across the entire institution. Due to limited capacity in the central warehouse, many hospitals have established secondary warehouses to handle the receipt, inventory management, and synchronized billing of certain general-use and high-value medical consumables.

Silver Wing Medical’s integrated storage, distribution, and transportation system can span the entire hospital building, eliminating the need for departments to rely on a secondary inventory management model to unlock warehousing capacity. This approach saves space while alleviating the burden of inventory management on individual departments.

Silver Wing Medical’s integrated smart hospital storage, distribution, and transportation system also supports the installation of retrieval ports on different floors, enabling healthcare professionals to access items on demand. This integrated system can reduce floor space requirements by an average of 60%–80%, and it can be customized to meet specific hospital needs. The storage solution can be optimized at any time based on the volume of stored items and available site conditions.

In the realm of intelligent hospital logistics, Silver Wing leverages big data to assess consumption patterns across departments, centrally sorts department-specific supply kits based on orders, and provides delivery services.

Under the smart IoT model, various supplies are equipped with RFID tags, enabling the system to accurately record data such as item category, quantity, and expiration date, thereby achieving full lifecycle traceability of medical supplies.

Silver Wing Medical’s solutions encompass the full spectrum of mainstream smart logistics modalities, including intelligent warehousing, medium-duty logistics, rail-guided carts, pneumatic tube systems, and multifunctional robots. These solutions meet diverse hospital requirements for material transport speed and payload capacity, enabling systematic integration of storage, distribution, and transportation across the entire facility.

The “integrated storage, distribution, and transportation” system can effectively support hospitals’ carbon neutrality initiatives, while returning space to the hospital, time to clinical care, and compassion to patients, thereby facilitating the smart development of healthcare institutions.

Currently, Silver Wing Medical has established a mature "integrated storage, distribution, and transportation" solution for hospital supply chains. This solution expands from automated transport to cover the full spectrum of in-hospital logistics, including automated inbound and outbound warehouse operations, automated sorting and packaging, and automated delivery. It achieves comprehensive lifecycle coverage, spanning from material admission and internal circulation to recovery.

In practical applications, while different types of logistics systems each have their own advantages, the actual construction of a logistics system must not only consider the characteristics of the logistics system itself but also fully account for the changes that future new technologies will bring to hospital medical processes, service models, and architectural layouts. The approach should be “tailored to the specific hospital, with targeted solutions.”

Therefore, at the initial stage of the project, Silver Wing Intelligent Solutions Medical Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. will conduct a comprehensive survey to collect all baseline information and data regarding logistics and distribution from the hospital. Based on the hospital’s actual circumstances, it will provide detailed planning, forecast future patient visit trends, and formulate highly targeted solutions.

It is understood that Silver Wing has currently served nearly 100 well-known medical institutions in China, including Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Zhongshan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, and Xinhua Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.