Garuda Aerospace, on Friday, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Narayana Health for transporting bio-medical supplies, marking its foray into the medical sector.
The partnership announcement came on the final day of Aero India 2023 and aims to revolutionise the delivery of critical and emergency medical supplies including samples for diagnosis in times of high traffic and other challenging conditions.
Garuda Aerospace will use its newly launched med-copter Sanjeevani drone for this purpose. Sanjeevani operates Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and has a payload capacity of 20-25 kilograms, with an endurance of 15-20 minutes.
The testing will begin in Narayana Health’s facility at Electronic City, in Bengaluru, which is spread over 32 acres, with about five to six hospitals. The drone network will work on a hub-and-spoke model, delivering blood samples and lightweight medical supplies like masks etc, between buildings inside the hospital facility, Dr Devi Shetty, Chairman & Executive Director, Narayana Health told DH in an interview. In the first phase, drones will be deployed in Bengaluru to transfer biomedical samples from Narayana Health City and HSR Layout on a daily basis. The service will then be extended to Mysore and West Bengal.
“In the next one year, our network of 21 hospitals will have these services,” he added.
Narayana Health is looking at expanding its services across India and beyond, including two of its hospitals in the Cayman Islands.
The partnership is expected to be for about five lakh drones, with one drone each in five lakh villages across India, Agnishwar Jayaprakash, Founder and CEO, Garuda Aerospace revealed.
This comes after the use of drones in the healthcare industry has seen significant development in the last two years. The Covid-19 pandemic witnessed drones delivering vaccines to several states including Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Kerala and Gujarat. The Prime Minister’s ambition to make India a drone hub by 2030, is supported by private drone manufacturers. However, it is an uphill journey.
Addressing the concerns about lower penetration of technology in public health sectors, Dr Shetty said, “The basic problem is more than 80 per cent of the hospitals across the world do not have electronic medical records. If you do not have electronic medical records, then you can’t standardise the treatment and the cost will not go down and healthcare will not be safer.”
Both Dr Shetty and Jayaprakash argued that drones have the potential to enhance diagnostic capabilities in remote places and help make healthcare more accessible to people in rural or underserved communities. Dr Shetty is hopeful that they can soon start transporting organs also through drone technology with interventions like temperature-controlled containers carrying organs faster and more effectively. “Organs are very light, one can easily transport them. If we can use the drone to transport orders, that can make a massive difference,” said Dr Shetty.
By equipping medical drones with LED screens, live medical consultations can be made possible along with the delivery of medical supply, Jayaprakash added.