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A Hospital's Circulatory System

How technicians and medics send material from blood samples to medication through miles of a 19th-century technology.

The technology dates to the 1800s, but the pneumatic tube system connecting Stanford Hospital, the Blake Wilbur Cancer Center and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital is a computer-controlled version that safely moves lab samples and medication while saving manpower and time. By regulating the airflow in the tubes—pressure propels containers and vacuums tug them—the containers move so swiftly that a tracking monitor can barely keep up.

This illustrated cross-section, color-coded to highlight different zones and transfer points, conveys only a small portion of the system's intricacy. There are 124 sending and receiving stations (including one for every nursing unit), as well as more than three dozen combinations of chiming tones to signal the arrival of different containers. Dedicated lines run between some departments and labs, and the tubes offer quick turnaround times to operating rooms that need to send arterial blood gases to the lab during surgeries. For every urgent use, however, there are many more common examples of the tubes' indispensability at a medical complex that conducts about 8 million lab tests per year.

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