How does a drone delivery service for medicines work in practice?
In this pilot project, deliveries of medicines were made to individuals in single-family homes; the medicines were packaged in purpose-designed boxes and the recipients had to agree to be at home to receive them, says Cindy Williams, Vice President and Chief Pharmacy Officer at Riverside Health, Virginia, USA.
The drone used for initial deliveries had a capacity to fly approximately 20 miles but was limited by battery life and Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) regulations to destinations within a two-mile radius of the hospital. “You probably never want to go to the full 20 miles ….. because you have to remember they have to return and they have to hover [in order to make the delivery]”, says Ms Williams. This type of drone could carry a total weight of about three pounds and, in fact, additional weight had to be added in the form of a bottle of water to make the cargo package heavy enough for the release mechanism to function, she explains.
The drone makes use of a guide-wire when it delivers the medication package. The GPS coordinates for the patient’s home are entered, then the drone takes off from the hospital drone port and goes up to about 300 feet above ground. Once it reaches the destination it will descend to an altitude of about 80 feet (~ 25 metres). It then lowers the package slowly on a guide-wire and when the package reaches the ground the hook disengages from the top of the box and the guide wire is retracted. (See video here 1.27 onwards) The drone then goes back up to 300 feet (~100 meters) and returns to the Drone Port. For this phase of the project, patients who lived in single-family homes with gardens were selected. Ms Williams acknowledges that drone delivery to apartment blocks could be more challenging.
For this project a second type of drone was required to cover longer distances. “Our drone partner did a tremendous amount of research and eventually settled on a drone manufactured in Australia”, recalls Ms Williams. That particular drone is more like a small plane with a cargo capacity of about five pounds. Rather than ‘dropping’ the cargo, it actually lands and personnel need to remove the cargo and then push a button to send the drone back to the Drone Port.
One important matter is the security of drone-delivered medicines and measures to ensure that the medicines are not stolen or damaged. “We coordinated very heavily with our patients that signed up to be in the pilot, to understand when we were going to deliver, which day and about which time and are they going to be home”, says Ms Williams. In practice, many other agencies also deliver medicines and parcels are commonly left on doorsteps, she adds. For this project, medicines were delivered in plain boxes to preserve patients’ privacy. From the pharmaceutical point of view there were also concerns about temperature variations, especially if there was a risk that medicines could be left out in freezing conditions, she notes.
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