Article Found on MedPage Today

AED-Carrying Drones May Speed Resuscitation
   
by Crystal Phend, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today
June 13, 2017

This article is a collaboration between MedPage Today® and American Heart Association.
 
Drones can speed delivery of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, a real-world test flight study determined.

When sent an address of a past real-life case by dispatchers, a drone bearing an AED autonomously took off and flew to the site to deliver the resuscitation equipment faster than emergency responders had reached the site in all 18 attempts, with a median reduction in response time of 16:39 min.

The drone took an average of 5:21 min to arrive from dispatch, compared with 22:00 for paramedics to reach the scene after dispatch (P<0.001), Andreas Claesson, RN, PhD, of the Karolinska Institutet's Center for Resuscitation Science in Stockholm, and colleagues reported.

"Saving 16 minutes is likely to be clinically important," they wrote in the June 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Another recent drone study, albeit using mathematical modeling rather than actual flights, suggested that a network in the Toronto region would cut 911 response times to out-of-hospital arrest in most cases by 6:43 min in the most urban areas and by 10:34 in the more rural areas.

However, impact on actual outcomes remains to be studied, as does performance of such a system in real-world use when weather isn't always optimal and longer distances may be required.

Claesson's drone study used consecutive out-of-hospital arrest cases from 2006 through 2014 as recorded in a Swedish registry occurring within 10 km (6.2 mi) of the fire station base in a Swedish town with extensive delay in EMS response times and a heavy population in the summer, deemed a good candidate for drone use.

The study was funded by the Stockholm city council innovation fund.

The researchers disclosed no relevant relationships with industry.

Click HERE to view article on MedPage Today.





Back To News Page