America: Michigan Residents To Receive Specialty Medications by Drone in 2024

Some Michi­gan res­i­dents will be able to have spe­cial­ty med­ica­tions and health­care prod­ucts deliv­ered by drones next year, reports eu.detroitnews.com. The Ann Arbor-based health sys­tem is part­ner­ing with drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny, Zipline, to car­ry out this inno­v­a­tive trans­porta­tion ser­vice.

The arti­cle states, “Load­ing docks, por­tals and charg­ers for the drones will be inte­grat­ed into Michi­gan Med­i­cine’s spe­cial­ty-care phar­ma­cy in Dex­ter, which will serve patients with com­plex and rare dis­eases.” In late March evtolinsights.com pub­lished two sto­ries about Zipline’s “game-chang­ing” approach to deliv­ery.

Watch Video: The Zipline “Game-Chang­er!”

Zipline Unveils NextGen Autonomous Drone Plat­form, “Very Qui­et, Very Pre­cise”

Dana Habers, Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer for Michi­gan Med­i­cine and COO for phar­ma­cy, com­ment­ed, “These patients rely on tem­per­a­ture-sen­si­tive med­ica­tions that require high main­te­nance and high-cost deliv­er­ies. This won’t replace our cor­ner­stone or our brick-and-mor­tar phar­ma­cy foot­print. It rep­re­sents that mail order com­po­nent and pri­mar­i­ly relates to spe­cial­ty phar­ma­cy patients.” Michi­gan Med­i­cine will be one of the first organ­i­sa­tions to use Zipline’s lat­est home deliv­ery sys­tem.

Conor French, Chief Reg­u­la­to­ry Offi­cer at Zipline, explained that each drone dock has a 10-mile ser­vice radius. The craft can fly up to 24 miles on a one-way trip car­ry­ing a 6 to 8 pounds of pay­load. He says, “Plat­form two is pre­cise enough to deliv­er to some­one’s patio table or to their doorstep and it’s near­ly inaudi­ble, it’s designed to actu­al­ly sound like rustling leaves.”

French con­tin­ued, “We expect to be able to com­plete deliv­er­ies of 10 miles in 10 min­utes. … Unlike cars and trucks, our zips nev­er get stuck in traf­fic. We want to start with some­thing sen­si­ble, but there’s ways in which we can increase the range based on where load­ing por­tals or docks are.” The sys­tem also is plan­ning to add drone bases to expand the net­work and range.

Conor French

Phar­ma­cists can load med­ica­tions into a deliv­ery droid in a mat­ter of sec­onds with­out leav­ing the build­ing. The small Star Wars look­ing vehi­cle will ascend into the zip drone, which then flies to its des­ti­na­tion and hov­ers around 300 feet above it. The droid can then descend and gen­tly land at the exact deliv­ery spot, even in high winds or rain. French point­ed out, “This goes quite quick­ly from nov­el to nor­mal.”

This drone deliv­ery will be offered to patients for free and is expect­ed to cost the health sys­tem less than deliv­er­ies using trucks. Habers said, “When pack­ages are shipped using trucks, they are sent in a Sty­ro­foam cool­er with ice packs designed to pre­serve the tem­per­a­ture range of the prod­uct for 48 hours, but with drone deliv­ery, we antic­i­pate that win­dow being much short­er and so the expec­ta­tion is that we could part­ner and work on pack­ag­ing and actu­al­ly reduce the amount of Sty­ro­foam and gel packs and oth­er mate­ri­als that we’re wast­ing.”

Michi­gan is the lat­est U.S State to work along­side Zipline and joins North Car­oli­na, Utah and Arkansas.

The drone ser­vice will replace truck deliv­er­ies for Michi­gan Med­i­cine’s mail-order phar­ma­cy to patients who choose to opt-in. It will not be used to trans­port any con­trolled sub­stances.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.va.gov/ann-arbor-health-care/

https://www.flyzipline.com

(News Source: https://eu.detroitnews.com/)