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GCN Home > 02/18/08 issue

Tubes for the 21st century

At NIH center, software manages pneumatic delivery

By William Jackson

DATA IS THE COIN of the realm in the Information Age’s service-based economy.

It is broken into bits, put into packets and routed via packet-switched networks to its destination.

But what about moving things in the physical world? The National Institutes of Health move thousands of blood products, biological samples, medications and medical devices every day between patient care units and the pharmacy, laboratories and other departments at its Clinical Research Center (CRC) in Bethesda, Md.

These vital items can’t be e-mailed, and center officials didn’t see value in having doctors, nurses and clerical staff deliver the items throughout the two-building complex’s nearly 3.4 million square feet. Instead, much of the material is packed into plastic carriers that are routed through a system of pneumatic tubes to their destinations.

“It’s cheaper to move these things around by tube than to have people do it,” said Lawrence Eldridge, now executive director at NIH’s Edmund J. Safra Family Lodge.

Eldridge, then an assistant to the CRC’s chief operating officer, helped with the design of the pneumatic system when the center was remodeled several years ago.

“Today, the building depends on it, and people depend on it,” said Jim Wilson, chief of facilities management at NIH. “People don’t want to log on to their computers in the morning and see that the network is down. And people don’t tolerate that in the tubes, either.”

If you are old enough to remember paper checks and cash, you probably recognize this technology from drive-up windows at banks, where tubes and carriers moved money and paperwork between cars and tellers.

If you are a little older, you might remember tube systems in department stores, where they connected the sales floors with stock rooms and financial offices, or in newspaper offices, where they moved copy from the newsroom to the typesetting and composing departments.

But the NIH tube network is not your father’s or grandfather’s pneumatic tube system.

The NIH system uses a bank of nine 10-horsepower blowers in the CRC’s subbasement to create the vacuum and pressure used to push and pull plastic carriers at 25 feet per second through the network of 6-inch tubes.

Proprietary software schedules and routes the carriers, much like a packet-switched network, from any source across multiple transfer points to any of more than 50 individually addressable destinations.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Content / Record Management, Data Management, IT Management, Workflow / Collaboration



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