Drones are helping hospitals in Rwanda better manage their blood supplies, and a new Wharton study shows patients are the biggest beneficiaries.
2 min. read
In 2016, the government of Rwanda began using drones to bypass the country’s hilly terrain and speed up the delivery of blood products to hospitals.
The decade-long project has been an undeniable success, according to a study by Wharton School experts that finds drone delivery not only dramatically improves patient outcomes, it also helps improve one of the most challenging and costly steps in the supply chain: the last mile.
Facilities served by drones reduced their in-hospital deaths of mothers with postpartum hemorrhage by 51%, and among trauma patients by 30%. On the inventory management side, hospitals served by drones have decreased the amount of red blood cells they keep in stock by 63%.
“That they have been able to save all these mothers is hugely impactful,” says Hummy Song, associate professor of operations, information and decisions at Wharton and co-author of the study. “We did all sorts of robustness checks to make sure that it’s not some spurious finding. We also talked to clinicians on the ground who described how it directly impacted the care they delivered.”
The authors found that all hospitals that adopted drone delivery decreased their inventory of red blood cells. Hospitals farthest from the ports made the biggest gains in reducing waste from expired supply.
“Reducing wastage was a really meaningful impact of this intervention because it’s very costly not only to get the blood donations, but to test and package and distribute it. If a blood product that you got all the way through the system goes to waste before you can use it, that’s just money gone,” Song says.
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