Futuristic hospital with robots opens up in San Francisco: The UCSF Mission Bay Hospital

University of California at San Francisco's Medical Center at Mission Bay is set to open on Super Bowl Sunday and it will be the first hospital in the world to have a range of autonomous mobile robots programmed to transport items such as meals, medications, linens and lab specimens.

The 25 tireless robots at the new medical center, created by Aethon Inc. which cost the hospital about $6 million, are among the largest fleet working to assist a medical complex in the world, according to ABC News.

Each robot can carry up to 1,000 pounds and is expected to traverse about 12 miles inside the medical center each day once the building are fully operational.

"We are bringing together so much more knowledge around precision medicine, around new approaches to providing care," Mark Laret, UCSF Medical Center's chief executive officer, told SF Gate. "For us, this becomes the place where people will participate in those clinical trials and research and benefit from that creativity. It's a big investment in the future of medicine."

The entire hospital has undergone nearly a decade of planning and building and cost $1.5 billion.

Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne donated one $100 million for the Childrens Hospital that now bears their name, but he says the entire tech community contributed.

Dr. Seth Bokser, UCSF's associate chief medical officer and a pediatrician, said during a tour of the hospital today that these robots are an integral part of the hospital's "staff." They will allow clinicians to stop spending time moving supplies around the hospitals and create more time to focus on providing medical care, he said.

"Whether it was giving money, designing technology, creating a patient solution," said Benioff.

Through patient-facing interactive technology, Bosker said he believes UCSF is "moving the culture towards shrinking the health literacy gap." He said that most patient rooms in the medical center come equipped with a tablet and a large screen monitor that allow the patients to connect and keep up to date with friends, family, coworkers and classmates outside the hospital, reducing stress and anxiety for the patient.

Officials at UC San Francisco said they expect 40 ambulances to transport approximately 140 patients from UCSF's Parnassus and Mount Zion campuses on Sunday, the first day that the 289-bed medical center will accept inpatients, according to Bizjournals.

The 878,000-square-foot facility is actually three hospitals in one: the 183-bed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco, the 70-bed UCSF Bakar Cancer Center and the 36-bed UCSF Betty Irene Moore Women's Hospital, along with the 207,500-square-foot UCSF Ron Conway Family Gateway Medical Building.