Servicon Joins Akara for AI Tech in Hospitals

CULVER CITY, CA -- Servicon, a national environmental and facility services company, is partnering with Akara, a healthcare automation company developing AI-enabled sensors and robotics for hospitals.

The partnership builds on a successful trial of Akara’s technology at a Los Angeles hospital supported by Servicon. It provides a pathway to deploy Akara’s technology across eight to nine public and private hospitals in Southern California over the next 12 to 18 months.

The partnership comes as Servicon, which has cared for complex facilities across healthcare, aerospace, life sciences and government for more than 50 years, continues to grow across 14 states.

The partnership brings together several AI technologies Akara has built for hospital environments. Ambient sensors mounted on the walls detect activity in the room, and Akara’s AI interprets that information to alert environmental services (EVS) teams when a patient is being discharged, identifies areas needing more frequent cleaning and records when a room has been cleaned.

For the highest-risk rooms, such as those used by patients with infectious illnesses, Akara’s Violet robot adds enhanced ultraviolet (UV) disinfection and helps return critical spaces to service sooner.

In many hospitals, EVS teams learn a room is ready through a chain of phone calls and handoffs between clinical staff, which leaves skilled workers waiting on information and keeps rooms offline longer than necessary.

Akara’s system is designed to direct Servicon teams to where they are needed as soon as they are needed, so rooms turn over faster, with quality assurance built in, allowing hospitals to treat more patients safely.

Over the past year, Servicon has worked closely with Akara in a live hospital environment and is playing a leading role in shaping how the technology is adopted and deployed, from the features frontline staff need to the way it fits into their daily routines.

“Our environmental services teams are the people who get every room ready for the next patient, and the most useful thing technology can do is give them better information and more time for the work only they can do,” said Craig Honig, CEO of Servicon.

“Akara’s sensors tell our teams where they’re needed as soon as a room needs them, and Violet is the most advanced UV disinfection robot on the market, allowing our technicians to clean and disinfect rooms faster and more effectively and keeping people safer from infection than ever before. Our teams helped shape how this technology works on a hospital floor, and this partnership gives us a path to bring it to more of the hospitals we serve.”

Akara’s sensors are privacy-preserving by design. They sense activity without capturing identifiable images, so the data cannot identify patients or staff, and processing happens on the device itself. Each sensor plugs into a standard electrical outlet, which allows hospitals to install the technology without a major working disruption or capital investment.

“Environmental services work has always taken skill, and our industry has wanted that skill recognized for a long time,” said Greg Mahdesian, head of partnerships and government affairs at Servicon. “When our frontline teams help decide how new technology is used on the job, they build expertise that opens the door to new roles and real career growth. Akara builds thoughtful technology for hospitals, and we see this partnership as an early look at where environmental services is headed.”

Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, said, “We see ourselves as tool builders, and the people who use those tools every day should determine how they work. Servicon has closely informed how our technology is designed into hospital workflows and rolled out, and their teams give us the feedback we need to keep improving what it can do. With Servicon’s hospital footprint in Southern California and its plans for growth, we see a clear path from one hospital to many.”

The announcement follows an Oct. 22 visit to Servicon by Peter Burke, Ireland’s Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, and representatives of Enterprise Ireland, the Irish government agency supporting Irish companies in global markets.