Drones Deliver Blood to Remote Places – and It Sure Helps!

Drones have been delivering blood products to remote health facilities across Rwanda, and meticulous analysis of the process has not only shown vast improvement in emergency delivery times, but also a significant reduction of waste in blood units.

“We found that drone delivery led to faster delivery times and less blood component wastage in health facilities,” as stated in the study.

The data had been collected from 20 health facilities in Rwanda between January 1^st, 2015, and December 31^st, 2019. According to data from the Regional Centre for Blood Transfusion (RCBT) and Google Maps, the cross-sectional comparison of estimated driving times with emergency delivery times from drones showed that 43% of the 12,733 blood product orders delivered by drones were emergency ones, and the delivery time was 79 minutes (RCBT estimates) or even 98 minutes (Google Maps estimates) faster than by existing roads. As for the analysis of changes in blood wastage after the use of drone delivery, 7.1 fewer blood unit expirations per month occurred, translating into a decrease of a whopping 67% over 12 months.