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Project Tests Drones for Rural Health Care [1]
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Date: 2024-02-21
A new project in West Texas will test if drones can help deliver health care to rural communities.
Working with Matador UAS Consortium, academic and industry partners accelerating the use of drones in rural health care, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) is testing drone delivery of medical supplies to Presidio, Texas.
Located close to the border between Texas and Mexico, Presidio is hours away from an urban healthcare center, Linda Molinar, Presidio County Medical Clinic CEO, said. She knows first-hand how life-altering timely access to care can be.
Not too long ago, she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder, a young Presidio man collapsed on a baseball field. Without his EpiPen, he had a full-blown asthma attack. It took hours for emergency services to arrive, she said, too late to save him.
City of Presidio, Texas. (Photo courtesy of TTUHSC)
“People don’t realize the needs of these rural areas. They really don’t understand because they’re not here,” she said. “By the time EMS got there, he had died… If something like this could have existed then, maybe the doctor could have called and gotten him an EpiPen.”
Dr. Phil Sizer, the lead researcher and head of Matador UAS Consortium, said testing the technology has just started, but the possibilities are encouraging.
Sizer said the drones can be used in several ways – to deliver prescriptions and medical supplies, to deliver medical samples or test results, or even to assist doctors in telehealth situations during search and rescue operations.
“In other words, we will provide this aerial service to close the gap between the health care provider and their patients,” he said.
In a typical setting, rural patients would travel hours to see a doctor, and then may have to travel back again to get specialized tests or hard-to-fill prescriptions. That presents a challenge to rural patients when it comes to getting appropriate care. Even in a telehealth setting, drones can help patients and providers overcome those roadblocks, he said.
“If I was talking to you as my telehealth patient, I might say… ‘The next time you’re in Lubbock, I need you to go get these tests,’” he said. “Well, we just eliminated the value of the telehealth visit because they will still need to make a trip. What we’re going to do is we’re going to bring different test possibilities, different supplies, different health support… to the patient and then return things from the patient to the provider.”
While the technology is in its initial stages, he said, he envisions it being used in many different ways – like allowing a doctor to telehealth into a crash scene in order to assist EMTs in stabilizing a patient, or to transport organs quicker and more securely to a rural hospital.
“We’re working with eight different organ procurement organizations across the United States who are supporting this initiative with us to learn how we can do that,” he said. “There were 7,500 organs lost last year due to transportation. We’re learning that even though that’s not a huge scalable business model, every life matters so there are huge social service and public health impacts there.”
Attaching a battery to a drone about to take off. (Photo courtesy of TTUHSC)
The drones fly above the line of sight, he said, and travel more than 70 miles an hour. Following railroad lines, the drones can make the 90 mile drive from Alpine, Texas to Presidio in just over an hour.
The speed and efficiency of transporting supplies to rural clinics will be a game changer, said Adrian Billings, M.D., Ph.D., TTUHSC’s associate academic dean of rural and community engagement. Without having to drive supplies back and forth to nearby larger communities, Federally Qualified Health Clinics (FQHCs) will save money.
“I think that this is just an additional resource that is quicker, less costly and really is a force multiplier,” he said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “I think that it allows the under-resourced rural health care workforce that is not robust enough as it should be… to continue doing their daily work using their license rather than having to do something like drive and take the risks driving brings.”
Billings said the technology would save labor costs, transportation costs and other costs by not needing licensed professionals to be in a car three to four hours a day taking supplies and test kits back and forth between rural hospitals and their larger partner facilities.
“You know, if pizza companies can deliver pizzas to customers (using drones), why can’t we also do that for medical supplies such as prescriptions and durable medical equipment as well?” he said.
In some ways, testing the technology in the Texas wilderness is an answer to pleas for help, he said.
“I think that any time companies or academic health centers that are typically more well-resourced than the rural health care organizations are, any time that they’re willing to share their resources with us,… I think it makes us feel heard,” he said.
“It makes us feel important and it makes us feel like maybe the calvary is coming to help our patients and help our health care organizations. It’s very validating and it gives us a lot of hope that new partners are coming to partner with us so we can provide the care that patients in our communities really deserve.”
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