On the eve of his first concert in the Philippines, musician, activist and Zipline board member Bono braves the EDSA traffic to sign a pact with the Philippine Red Cross and Zipline, the world’s first and only national scale drone delivery service, to begin making on-demand and emergency blood deliveries by drone across the country. The announcement was made today during a signing ceremony at the Red Cross Headquarters along EDSA with the organization’s chairman and CEO, Sen. Richard Gordon and Zipline CEO Keller Rinuado.
Explaining why he feels so strongly for efficient blood delivery services, Bono said, “Where you live should never decide whether you live.” He was obviously referring to Filipinos in dire need of blood living in places unreachable by motor vehicles.
Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock bank U2, is currently in Manila to perform in a one-night concert tomorrow, Dec. 11, at the Philippine Arena.
Starting with blood from the Philippine Red Cross, and expanding to include over 150 critical and life-saving medical products, the revolutionary new service will use a network of autonomous drones to make on-demand emergency deliveries. The service, which is expected to be launched in the summer of 2020, is capable of operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Zipline plans to establish three centers, which will be collectively capable of making hundreds of deliveries per day to thousands of health facilities serving millions of people across the country. The company plans to launch the first of its three planned distribution centers in the Visayas region. Future distribution centers will potentially help the partnership expand service to eastern Visayas and Mindanao.
“Geography and Mother Nature Can get in the way of our work in reaching the most vulnerable, making it difficult for them to get access to blood and vital medicines,” said Sen. Gordon, chairman for the Philippine Red Cross. “We’re no longer going to hope that those that need help have to make their way to the Red Cross in a medical emergency. We are excited to bring the newest technology in fulfilling our mission. The Philippine Red Cross will soon be able to reach patients at hospitals across the country on-demand and within minutes. We’re going to use drones to bring you the life-saving blood you need right away. This new technology could help us save thousands of lives. And we’re honored to partner with Zipline to make it possible. The PRC stands committed to being the lifeline of the people – of being always first, always ready and always there.”
“Millions of people in the Philippines can’t access the vital medical products they need because of last-mile transportation challenges,” said Rinaudo. “Zipline’s instant drone delivery service was designed to help solve that problem. We’re honored to partner with the Philippine Red Cross to make sure that patients across the country can access the blood they need to stay alive no matter where they are and no matter the circumstances.
In addition to the Philippine Red Cross, Zipline will be working to expand its partnerships in the Philippines to include both government and private health care facilities as well as to the pharmaceutical industry to help expand universal health care access for millions of Filipinos.
More than two billion people across the world cannot access the medicine they need to stay healthy and alive because of last-mile transportation challenges.
This is especially true in the Philippines, where just over half of the country’s close to 105 million people live in rural areas across more than 7,000 islands. Millions of those rural citizens are among the Philippines’ most vulnerable populations, living in the country’s more than 4,000 geographically isolated disadvantaged areas, or GIDA.
While delivering medicine to patients in these and other communities is a challenge in the best of weather conditions, it is made all the more difficult during natural disasters like typhoons, earthquakes, landslides and tropical storms when roads become washed out or are impassable altogether. All too often, these medical access challenges result in deaths. Zipline’s instant medical delivery service by drone was designed to help overcome these challenges and bring patients the vital medical supplies they need when they need them.
How the service works
Zipline is dedicated to expanding universal health coverage by providing on-demand instant delivery by drone of more than 150 critical and life-saving medical products, including blood and vaccines. Health workers place orders by text message and receive their deliveries in 30 minutes on average. The drones both take off from and land at Zipline’s distribution centers, requiring no additional infrastructure at the clinics they serve.
The drones fly autonomously and can carry 1.8 kilos of cargo, flying up to 145 kilometers an hour, and have around trip range of 160 kilometers in high wind and rain. Each Zipline distribution center can deliver to an area of more than 20,000 square miles serving populations of up to 12 million people. Deliveries are made from the sky, with the drone descending to a safe height above the ground and releasing a box of medicine by parachute to a designated spot at the health center it serves.
Zipline Record To Date
Zipline’s autonomous drones have flown more than a million miles, made tens of thousands of on-demand medical deliveries, and helped to save thousands of lives in emergencies. Since launching in October of 2016 to deliver blood to 21 hospitals in Rwanda, Zipline has expanded its service nationwide, putting most of the country’s 12 million citizens within minutes of a life-saving delivery of hundreds of medical products from 450 facilities.
In 2018, Zipline began working with the U.S. Department of Defense – both the United States and Australia- to demonstrate how its technology could help transform emergency medicine and critical care in conflict, humanitarian and disaster relief scenarios. In April of 2019, Zipline partnered with the Government of Ghana to launch four distribution centers that will serve 2,000 health facilities and a population of 12 million people across the country. And in September of 2019, Zipline announced that it would expand its service to India as part of a government initiative to put 120 million people within range of instant medical delivery by drone.
Zipline’s Global Expansion in 2019 and Beyond
Zipline’s commercial partnership are expected to help save tens of thousands of lives over the next several years. Zipline’s goal is to serve 700 million people in the next five years. The company is hard at work catching up to demand to expand drone delivery services to developed and developing countries across Africa, South Asia, The Asia-Pacific region, and the Americas. Zipline is working with U.S. state of North Carolina to launch its medical drone delivery capability as a part of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s competitive UAS Integration Pilot Program.
