The following is an article written by Brian Hughes of UPS.
The following is based on an interview with Keller
Rinaudo, the CEO of Zipline, a California-based robotics company
that works with governments, private companies and public-private
partners to provide reliable access to medical products at the last
mile.
Imagine that you’re grocery shopping for your family. But you
can only go to the store twice a year. And you don’t have a working
refrigerator at home.
What do you do?
That’s just an average day for medical professionals throughout
Africa. In an age of unprecedented technological leaps, they can’t
get healthcare goods as soon as a need arises.
That’s because nearly all roads in large swaths of Africa become
impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles carrying medical
supplies often break down on the side of the road, forced to wait
for help and unable to work around Mother Nature. In other areas,
there simply aren’t any roads.
In many supply chains, half of all deliveries never make it to
the final destination. The costs are so high that health facilities
often opt for just a few deliveries a year.
In other words, don’t forget that milk at the grocery store. You
might not go back for another six months.
Help never came
Health workers in Africa don’t get a do-over, either. They must
anticipate the greatest needs in a community well before a patient
walks through their doors. If a patient arrives at a clinic and
needs a medical product that is out of stock, the clinic will
usually turn that person away.
The problem here isn’t some head-scratching mystery. According
to the World Health Organization, 5.9 million kids under the age of
five died last year because they lacked access to basic medical
products or care.
A researcher in Tanzania designed a text-alert system for
hospitals to send out distress calls when a patient was at risk of
dying. This researcher’s work provided a heartbreaking portrait of
a typical day in the heart of Africa.
Among the many messages: A rabid dog bit a child. We need rabies
prophylaxis. A woman who just gave birth is suffering from
postpartum hemorrhaging. We need blood.
He had a database with thousands of similar stories. The
messages kept piling up. Cellphones helped identify a clear need.
However, help never came.
The health system knew in real time when someone was dying
because that person didn’t have access to a basic medical product.
But the other piece of the puzzle was still missing. That missing
piece was logistics.
This is a classic story about the importance of logistical
innovation. You can have the best intentions. You can have talented
people committed to a noble cause. But if you can’t get items from
Point A to Point B, you have a recipe for failure.
Luckily, there is a blueprint to break this logjam. Technology
has finally caught up with our aspirations for bettering the
world.
Drones bring hope
Roads were the biggest problem. So what if you could get around
roads altogether?
The people at Zipline have backgrounds in building reliable
robotics systems. They’ve seen first-hand how technology can make
the impossible, possible. They knew there had to be a better way to
deliver medical care to a region where lives depend on finding a
better solution.
In February, the Rwandan government announced that they would
begin using Zipline drones, which can make up to 150 deliveries of
blood per day to 21 transfusing facilities located in the western
half of the country.
On Monday, Zipline announced a partnership with UPS and Gavi,
the Vaccine Alliance, to explore using drones to transform the
delivery of lifesaving medicines like blood and vaccines. The UPS
Foundation awarded an $800,000 grant to support the initial launch
of this initiative in Rwanda and extend the Rwandan government’s
vision to countries across Africa.
This is a collective effort. Using its logistical expertise, UPS
will contribute significant healthcare logistics experience to this
lifesaving cause. Gavi will help identify communities that are most
in need of aid. Because each partner plays to its strengths, the
potential impact grows.
The drone network in Rwanda is devoted to delivering blood
supplies, but this partnership plans to expand the initiative to
include vaccines, treatments for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis
and many other essential and lifesaving medicines.
The (healing) power of the drone
Many in public health believe that better forecasting is the
solution to stock-outs at hospitals and clinics.
But this will lead to incremental, not transformational,
improvement. For context, many health centers now receive
deliveries just twice a year. With the aid of a drone, we can
conduct two deliveries a day to more than 100 health centers within
range.
We’ve already seen technology enter environments lacking phones
or even bank accounts. The technology has leapfrogged the absence
of infrastructure to deliver extreme value for millions of people.
The Rwandan government believes drones will do the same for
Africa.
The incredible scale of smartphones has created this new supply
chain, facilitating the affordable production of reliable robotics
systems and autonomous airplanes. This makes it possible to build
fast, efficient and affordable drones.
The Rwandan government’s vision could ensure that Rwanda’s 11
million citizens are within a 30-minute delivery of any essential
medical product.
Guardians in the sky
Here’s how it works: Zipline builds hubs and unpiloted drone
airplanes. Each hub can hold between 10 and 15 drones. Zipline
places a hub next to an existing warehouse with strong access to
essential medical products, enabling hundreds of deliveries to any
location within range – and as soon as a request has been made.
When Zipline brings a health center online, they set up
a mailbox, which is the size of three parking spaces. Packages
are always delivered right into that mailbox. After a health worker
places an order via text message, someone in the hub will find
their medical product, load it into the electrically-powered
vehicle and take the drone through pre-flight.
They’ll then set the drone on the launcher. After launch, the
drone flies in a straight line directly to the health center,
descends close to the ground and slowly drops the package safely in
the mailbox.
Zipline had to design these drones so they could fly in severe
wind and rain. That’s because people don’t wait for good weather to
get sick or have a medical emergency. The company also designed a
system based on commercial aviation reliability standards. These
vehicles are far more dependable than the off-the-shelf,
quad-copters deployed by hobbyists.
With the stakes so high, Zipline had to get the technology
just right.
We don’t need roads
These kinds of automated solutions represent the future of
logistics in the 21st century. Fast, urgent breakthroughs can
augment existing logistics supply chains in a valuable way.
Rwanda doesn’t have the same level of resources as the United
States or European nations. It’s emerging from a painful history of
sectarian violence. And yet, Rwanda will become the first country
to use this technology to improve healthcare and save lives on such
a wide scale.
This small but innovative country is going to lead the world
into the future. That’s a testament to not just the power of
technology but also the people who find new ways to harness those
innovative products.
We may never have a modern road network across Rwanda. But as
Doc Brown, the innovator and scientist from “Back to the Future”
might say: Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
This is part two of a two-part series on an innovative
collaboration between Zipline, a California-based robotics company;
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UPS. Read part one here.
Brian Hughes is a writer and editor at Longitudes.
Reprinted with permission of Longitudes, the UPS
blog devoted to the trends shaping the global economy.
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