December 21, 2023 – In 2013, Amazon became CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 minutes to make a daring announcement: in 5 years, Amazon customers would receive deliveries via drones. People could get almost any item they wanted in only half-hour.
A decade later, drones aren't exactly ubiquitous. One headline said the corporate's drone delivery service, Prime Air, had “delivered to fewer homes than there are words in this headline” in its first few weeks. In the further course of 2023 the outlook didn't appear to be improving. Last month, The New York Times called the endeavor “disappointing.”
But there’s significantly more enthusiasm for drones in healthcare. “Drone deliveries are here, but not where people expect them to be,” said Hillary Brendzel, head of the U.S. healthcare practice at Zipline, a San Francisco-based drone delivery company. Instead of food or batteries, the long run of drones could well lie in medicine.
Late October, Cleveland Clinic announced a partnership with Zipline, with plans to start drone prescription delivery at greater than a dozen locations across Ohio by 2025. Other hospitals – comparable to Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, and Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, UT – have announced similar programs.
The technology, which remains to be being tested, could soon change into the norm, said Don Carroll, associate chief of pharmacy on the Cleveland Clinic. “We want to help our patients manage their health problems by providing timely access to all medications.” The drones could also carry laboratory samples, medical supplies and items for home hospital use.
It's not nearly convenience. Moving lab samples between facilities “in minutes and on the fly, rather than the hours it currently takes,” means patients “are diagnosed and treated more quickly, leading to better health outcomes,” Brendzel said.
Pharmacies are also experimenting with drone delivery Walgreens, CVS Health, Walmartand last Amazon. At no additional cost, Amazon Pharmacy customers in College Station, TX can have their medications—including treatments for every thing from flu and pneumonia to asthma and blood pressure medications—delivered to their door in lower than an hour.
Other firms are exploring drones for emergency use, a faster option to deliver defibrillators and other medical supplies to individuals who urgently need them.
“Leading U.S. health systems are seeing the benefits,” Brendzel said — not only in prescriptions, but in all elements of health care, including medical and emergency care. “They are now investing in drone delivery, which means instant, autonomous delivery for patients across the country will go from science fiction to routine.”
History and progress
The use of drones in healthcare shouldn’t be recent. During the pandemic, drones have been used for every thing Health monitoring To Providing COVID testing. Zipline has been using drones to deliver blood, vaccines and other medical supplies to the East African country of Rwanda since 2016 Data collected from public hospitals in Rwandait has directly led to a 51 percent reduction in maternal mortality from postpartum hemorrhage.
However, security concerns remain. Amazon drones have reportedly crashed at least eight times between 2021 and 2022, including an incident that caused a 20 hectare bushfire in Oregon. And last 12 months, a delivery drone hit power lines in Queensland, Australia. Turn off power for around 2,000 households.
But drone technology has also made great progress lately. Just give it some thought this clip of greater than 30 “Zips” – the nickname for Zipline’s Platform 2 drones – as of late November, seamlessly sharing the skies at certainly one of the corporate’s test sites and not using a single near miss.
Both Zipline And Amazon has introduced next-generation drones this 12 months that aren’t only more maneuverable and capable of avoid collisions in densely populated areas, but in addition quieter than ever before. A March video from science YouTuber Mark Rober states: quickly went viral — 29 million views up to now — he called the Zip droid “whisper-quiet” and noted that the cows mooing nearby was actually louder.
Zips are also capable of creating a 10-mile delivery in only 10 minutes to express locations comparable to a porch or backyard patio table by lowering a “delivery droid” (concerning the size of a toaster) with a tether wire from the Zip it hovers about 300 feet above the bottom. To avoid packages being left unattended, customers should be home to receive their deliveries, which might be tracked on their phone and scheduled at precise times.
Improving access to medicines
This all might sound like something out of the odd The Jetsonsbut unlike floating treadmills and cars fold into briefcasesHealth drones are a more practical and even needed technological innovation.
“Pharmacy deserts are now a real phenomenon,” Carroll said widespread drugstore closures In recent years, many Americans not have quick access to a pharmacy. More than 40% of U.S. counties are pharmacy deserts, GoodRx research shows, and the proportion could also be disproportionately high in Black and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods affected. “Not everyone has convenient access to a pharmacy anymore.”
Even those that have a pharmacy nearby can't at all times get there, either due to transportation issues or because they will't get home from work during pharmacy opening hours.
“The patient journey from diagnosis to medication is something we don’t manage well in traditional healthcare,” said Vin Gupta, MD, chief medical officer of Amazon Pharmacy. “I’ve seen firsthand the ultimate consequences when people don’t come forward. There have been several incidents with my patients who were at high risk of contracting the flu, for example, and despite our best efforts, it took a week or longer from the first symptom of illness to taking medication.”
But drone deliveries could allow more patients “to stay out of the emergency room and hopefully the intensive care unit,” Gupta said said.
Accelerating emergency response
As some firms are already exploring, drones could play a critical role in emergency response. In the summer of 2020, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden I tested the efficiency The use of drones to quickly dispatch automated external defibrillators (AEDs) alongside ambulances in cities comparable to Gothenburg and Kungälv. During the four-month study, they found that in cardiac arrest emergencies, the defibrillators arrived before the ambulance 64% of the time, with a median time advantage of 1 minute and 52 seconds.
“We can use AEDs in summer and winter, in daylight and in darkness,” said lead researcher Andreas Claesson, PhD, an associate professor on the university’s Center for Resuscitation Science. “When deployed, we arrive ahead of the rescue service with a very good time advantage.”
Defibrillators are only the tip of the iceberg. Anything in the identical general weight range as an AED (as much as 1.5 kg or about 3 kilos) could conceivably be delivered by drone. “Like naloxone nasal dispensers for opioid poisoning,” Claesson said. “Or trauma dressings or tourniquets for uncontrolled bleeding caused by shootings, stabbings or other terrorist attacks.” When medical equipment is required quickly, faster than a four-wheeled ambulance can get there, a drone could mean the difference between life and death .
A shipment of defibrillator drones could soon be arriving on U.S. shores, due to Atlanta-based Skyfire Consulting. Skyfire was founded in 2014 to make it easier for police, firefighters and other first responders to make use of drone technology of their day by day operations. The company has focused on reducing the waiting time between the primary signs of cardiac arrest and life-saving measures.
“Historically, defibrillators have been very heavy and cumbersome, both things that make them difficult to fly with drones,” said Matt Sloane, CEO and founding father of Skyfire. But in recent months they’ve conducted test flights in Buford, Georgia, and Huntsville, AL, using Avive defibrillators, “one of the smallest and most technologically advanced AEDs on the planet,” Sloane said.
“Once a person goes into cardiac arrest, you have about five minutes to begin life-saving treatment, otherwise that person's chances of survival decrease significantly,” he said. But with drones, deaths from heart attacks could dramatically decrease, especially in rural communities where it could take as much as quarter-hour for an ambulance to reach.
“We are working closely with local hospitals, fire departments and emergency medical services to find the best places to deploy this technology and the best way to deploy these aircraft to get to a patient's side most quickly,” he said Sloane.
Flying into the long run
As exciting because the innovations could also be, none of them will occur overnight. Cleveland Clinic will spend much of 2024 coordinating with local government officials to make sure compliance with safety and technical requirements and installing zipline docks and loading gantries throughout Northeast Ohio. “We will begin with a smaller number of deliveries in 2025 and plan to increase this number over time,” Carroll said.
Equally essential, he said, is “educating our patients about how drone deliveries work.” It could find yourself being the largest challenge of all. Very much like the general public hug slowly ATMs as a substitute of human bank tellers — Americans may must be convinced to skip the annoying (but familiar) line on the pharmacy and go for droid delivery as a substitute.
But Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Zipline's CEO and co-founder, shouldn’t be just hopeful, he's extremely optimistic. “Over the next 10 years, a new global logistics network” — which incorporates but shouldn’t be limited to Zipline — “will be built,” he said. “It will be automated, emission-free and ten times faster than today.”
It can be “bigger than UPS and FedEx combined,” Cliffton said, “and will have a hugely important impact on humanity by providing universal access to health care.”