If these were out of stock locally, patients would previously have been referred to another hospital and transported via ambulance. Thanks to drone delivery, rural facilities can now order rarer blood products, including platelets, fresh frozen plasma, and cryoprecipitates-special proteins isolated from plasma. “Certainly for places that are hard to get to.” “These things could be a game changer,” Maitland says of drone delivery. “If you need a transfusion, you need it now.” Yet traveling for a transfusion takes time that could jeopardize a sick kid’s life. Children in East Africa face the threat of malaria, which can cause severe anemia. To her, drones are particularly useful for emergency blood transfusions. Maitland has lived in East Africa for 22 years, and she works on clinical trials for critical illnesses. The drones seem to answer a huge need, says Kathryn Maitland, a pediatrician from Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.
“It's a validation of the work that we've been doing, in many ways.” In the years since starting blood distribution in Rwanda, Zipline has also partnered with the government of Ghana, in West Africa, to deliver blood, medicine, and vaccines by drone. “It's exciting for us,” says Israel Bimpe, a trained pharmacist and the director of Zipline’s Africa Go-To-Market division, based in Rwanda. She began pulling data from Zipline and Rwanda’s health information system for her analysis, such as order volumes, delivery times, and locations. (The major X-factor for drones is weather-Rwanda is very mountainous, so flying conditions can turn dicey fast-which is why flight operators check the weather and confirm the best route for every approved delivery.) But Nisingizwe wanted to measure how much drones reduced travel times and waste, if at all. Zipline’s drone system seemed more efficient.
#Medical drones driver#
Staff would fill the order, and the driver would return with it. When rural hospital workers needed blood, they’d fill out paper forms, which a driver would take to a national transfusion facility. “Frankly, we couldn't have done this evaluation had they not had the data system in place,” says Law.īefore starting her analysis, Nisingizwe traveled to Rwanda to learn about the traditional logistics for delivering blood there. That’s a gold mine for researchers like Nisingizwe, who want to measure just how much innovation helps. “They have one of the most complete electronic data systems,” says Michael Law, Nisingizwe’s advisor and a health policy researcher at UBC, which lets Rwanda’s Ministry of Health track how many people see physicians, how many have malaria or HIV, and how many give birth at health facilities. By 2013, RapidSMS connected 15,000 villages to the country’s wider network of doctors, hospitals, and ambulances. In 2009, the government piloted a phone-based program, called RapidSMS, to track and reduce maternal and child mortality. Rwanda’s universal health care system reaches over 90 percent of the population. A turbulent drive is not a perfect match for such finicky cargo.ĭon’t be fooled by Rwanda’s rural demographics the country has a reputation for leaning into health tech innovations. If kept cool, donated blood can be stored for just a month or so, but some components that hospitals isolate for transfusions-like platelets-will spoil in days. So, traditionally, when remote hospitals needed blood, it came by road. But in Rwanda, that number flips: 83 percent of Rwandans live in rural areas. In African nations like Libya, Djibouti, and Gabon, about 80 to 90 percent of the populations live in cities, too. In the United States and the United Kingdom, 80 percent of the population clusters around urban hubs with high-traffic hospitals and blood banks. That’s not a huge problem if you live in a city. And when they do, the red stuff stored in Place A has to find its way to a patient in Place B-fast.
Anemic children need urgent transfusions. More than 12 million people live in the small East African country, and like those in other nations, sometimes they get into car accidents. Six years ago, Rwanda had a blood delivery problem.
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