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Zipline drones to deliver drugs to OhioHealth

Ohio­Health last week announced a part­ner­ship with Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous deliv­ery ser­vice, to inte­grate Zipline’s ful­ly elec­tric drone deliv­ery into OhioHealth’s net­work.

Using Zipline’s new­ly-intro­duced Plat­form 2, Ohio­Health will bring pre­scrip­tions direct­ly to patients’ homes and move lab sam­ples and sup­plies between Ohio­Health facil­i­ties.

By 2025, the part­ner­ship is expect­ed to form an ini­tial net­work capa­ble of reach­ing near­ly 2 mil­lion peo­ple in the greater Colum­bus area with fast, qui­et and sus­tain­able drone deliv­ery.

Ohio­Health VP of phar­ma­cy ser­vices Charles McCluskey said: “Zipline drone deliv­ery pro­vides a great alter­na­tive for Ohio­Health as we look to grow our home infu­sion and spe­cial­ty phar­ma­cy home deliv­ery ser­vices. It gets prod­ucts to patients more quick­ly and at a low­er cost and uses less car­bon inten­sive pack­ing mate­ri­als com­pared to our tra­di­tion­al deliv­ery meth­ods.”

Ohio­Health senior direc­tor of logis­tics Joshua Dritz added: “We are con­stant­ly look­ing at how to opti­mise the logis­tics of OhioHealth’s net­work and with our ini­tial Zipline deploy­ment focussed on the lab­o­ra­to­ry oper­a­tions, we will sig­nif­i­cant­ly cut the time it takes to process lab sam­ples and diag­nos­tics, giv­ing our physi­cians the infor­ma­tion, they need to make informed deci­sions faster.”

Hillary Brendzel, head of Zipline’s US health­care prac­tice con­tin­ued: “We can move lab sam­ples between facil­i­ties in min­utes and at a moment’s notice, instead of the hours it cur­rent­ly takes. That means that peo­ple get diag­nosed and treat­ed faster with Ohio­Health bring­ing our inno­va­tions to the peo­ple they serve across the state.”

Ohio­Health will use Zipline’s next-gen­er­a­tion Plat­form 2, which uses autonomous, elec­tric Zipline drones (Zips) to make pre­cise deliv­er­ies to rur­al, sub­ur­ban, and even dense urban areas across the region. Zipline’s home deliv­ery ser­vice is expect­ed to deliv­er up to sev­en times faster than tra­di­tion­al auto­mo­bile deliv­ery, com­plet­ing 10-mile deliv­er­ies in about 10 min­utes.

Unlike oth­er drone deliv­ery ser­vices, Zips fly more than 300 feet above the ground and are near­ly inaudi­ble. When the Zip arrives at its des­ti­na­tion, it hov­ers safe­ly and qui­et­ly at that alti­tude, while its ful­ly autonomous deliv­ery droid manoeu­vres down a teth­er, steers to the cor­rect loca­tion, and gen­tly drops off its pack­age to areas as small as a patio table or the front steps of a home. Researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia found an 88% reduc­tion of in-hos­pi­tal mater­nal deaths from to post­par­tum haem­or­rhage as a result of Zipline’s logis­tics and deliv­ery sys­tem.

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Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

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