Member-only story
You’re Dying on the Street. A Drone Might Be Your Only Hope.
It sounds far-fetched, but one doctor believes aerial drones could prevent fatal overdoses and heart attacks
Imagine walking toward a busy intersection and seeing a teenager passed out on the sidewalk, fentanyl patches peeking out of their pocket. You call 911 and tell them you think a kid has overdosed on opioids. The dispatcher says they’ll send an ambulance, but it might take 10 minutes or longer. You don’t know how long the teen’s been out and worry they might die before help arrives.
It’s situations like these that pediatrician Mark Hanna considered while walking to his job as a resident physician at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Hanna tells OneZero that he saw ambulances “struggling to get past” rush-hour traffic and wondered whether they’d actually reach patients before it was too late.
But then he had a thought: “Are drones even faster than ambulances?”
According to Hanna’s research comparing the ability of drones and ambulances to reach the scene of a medical emergency, the answer is yes, and his work suggests there’s potential to greatly improve emergency care in crowded cities. At the American Academy of Pediatrics conference in New Orleans on Friday, Hanna will present his findings showing that this pattern held especially true during peak rush hour, when ambulances have many more cars and pedestrians to maneuver through. For his analysis, Hanna compared open-source data on EMS response times within his hospital’s zip code to the time it took to fly drones to the same area.
On average, the drones beat ambulances to the scene by three minutes. It may not seem like much, but it could be the difference between life and death for someone experiencing acute anaphylaxis, cardiac arrest, or opioid overdose.
“I think the number one application in my brain is opiate overdose from fentanyl in adolescents,” Hanna says. “Anybody can walk into a pharmacy right now and buy a prescription, almost over the counter, for Narcan, and if you walk into our hospital, we’ll just give it to you. And this is a medication that’s administered up somebody’s nose. So if we could… get that medication by drone to someone who’s…
