It’s a Bird. It’s an Airplane. It is a Medical Response Drone.

What if the first responder on the scene of a cardiac arrest was a drone carrying an automated external defibrillator?

When every second counts, public safety professionals are increasingly wary of drones — which can fly 60 miles an hour and don’t get stuck in traffic – to provide help faster than an ambulance or EMT.

Starting in September, 911 callers in Clemmons, NC, can see a drone approaching those suffering cardiac arrest. Under a pilot program operated jointly by the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, local emergency services, Clinical Research Institute to Duke University and a drone consulting firm Hovecondrone pilots from the sheriff’s department monitor 911 calls and dispatch drones.

The sheriff’s office has approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate within a radius of 2 kilometers from the launch site, beyond visual line of sight. Upon arrival, a drone will rescue 125 feet over the caller’s location and lower an AED complete with verbal instructions.

“We’ve never been able to move the needle for cardiac arrest in private settings, and this technology could meet that need,” he said. Monique Anderson Starks, a cardiologist and associate professor of medicine at Duke, who leads the program. It will eventually operate six drones at six sites in Forsyth County and James City County, Va., that can deliver AEDs, he said.

It is a critical issue. More than 356,000 people suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year in the United States. By the way 90 percent die, because they do not receive immediate help. Every minute that goes by without medical intervention decreases the chance of survival 10 percent.

In the United States, emergency medical services take an average of seven minutes to arrive after a 911 call, a study found, but the time varies considerably by region.

A Swedish study published in the Lancet in 2023 compared cardiac arrest response times between drones and ambulances 58 implementations in an area of ​​approx 200,000 people. It found that drones beat the ambulance to the scene two-thirds of the time, by a median of three minutes and 14 seconds.

Drones are also being tested in other types of medical emergencies. In Florida, Tampa General Hospital, Manatee County and Archer First Response Systems start a program in May to provide not only AEDs by drone, but also tourniquets and Narcan, the nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose. The program currently operates within a 1.5 mile, visual line of sight radius.

In New York City, the police department plans to use drones to hunt them down Emergency flotation devices to swimmers in difficulty at local beaches. Emergency responders elsewhere have used drones to locate people moving away from care homes.

An obstacle to the spread of these programs has been the usual requirement of the FAA that these aircraft devices are used in the visual line of sight of their operators. In May, when Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Invoicegave the FAA four months to issue a proposed rule explaining the requirements for operating beyond visual line of sight.

“The FAA is focused on developing standard rules to make (beyond visual line of sight) operations routine, scalable and economically viable,” he said. Rick Breitenfeldtan FAA spokesman.

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