The Indian healthcare sector bears the burden of the country’s 1.3 billion population, burgeoning at an exponential growth rate. Of this, 70 percent of the population is concentrated in the rural areas where only 3 percent of the country’s doctors live. Considering the facilities, large swathes of the rural populace live in hilly and remote areas without access to even primary or basic healthcare.
On top of this chronic lack of access to critical healthcare items, the logistics sector is riddled with roadblocks of its own. Poor road conditions, inadequate supply chain, poor product visibility and tracking are widening the healthcare gaps in hard-to-reach areas. Amid the present landscape which is taking a huge toll on countless lives, TechEagle - India's pioneer and lead manufacturer of long-range, high speed, heavy payload delivery drone solutions is overcoming connectivity barriers and delays in access to urgent healthcare supplies and services in underserved areas by building an on-demand Drone logistics airline.
Enabling faster healthcare outcomes
Today, transportation is considered one of the biggest barriers to lack of healthcare access. On one hand, Telemedicine is playing a crucial role in connecting doctors to remotely located patients. However, on the other hand, the issues of sample collection for diagnosis and medicine/vaccine/blood availability at the right time remain unsolved due to slow & improper ground logistics.
Given the hardships, TechEagle harnesses the benefits of on-demand drone delivery to collect test samples and deliver them to path labs rapidly. The startup shortens the turn-around time from 3-5 days to 6-7 hours, strengthening the logistics network. Additionally, it brings rapid results and quick diagnosis to enable doctors to make breakthrough progress and save countless lives that are lost due to delays.
For years, the hard-to-reach population has suffered from obstructions to healthcare accessibility. Considering the gaps in the Indian healthcare landscape, TechEagle has taken this endeavor to remove bottlenecks from healthcare logistics by reaching far-flung and inaccessible areas such as hills, forests and valleys. It makes timely deliveries of healthcare supplies within hours than several days.
Bringing transformative drone delivery airline
Recently, TechEagle partnered with the Government of Meghalaya carry out India’s first hybrid e-VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) drone delivery of lifesaving medicines. It successfully loaded its state-of-the-art e-VTOL Drone AquilaX2 with medical essentials to take off from Nongstoin District Hospital vertically like a helicopter. Upon reaching the mission height, it converted automatically into fixed-wing (like passenger aircraft) mode to travel an aerial distance of 25 km at 90 kmph speed to reach Maweit PHC (primary healthcare centre), where it automatically converted itself back to rotary-wing mode to land vertically like a helicopter to handover the box to a doctor at the center.
By Road, it takes approx 4 hours to reach Maweit PHC hence supply of any critical medicine, blood, vaccine or anti venom within the first golden hour of the patient is practically impossible. But with TechEagle’s Drone it was transported within 25 minutes, which is 10X faster than conventional modes of transport.
Besides this, TechEagle also partnered with the Government of Telangana to deliver vaccines and medicines supply in the State. Its drone transported vaccines in temperature-controlled boxes from the distribution center to the primary health center (PHC) and collected samples in return flight.
Commenting on the technology front, Vikram Singh Meena, founder and CEO of TechEagle said, “Safety and security are of paramount importance to the firm. We have built drones with precise navigation, detection and avoidance for manned and unmanned aviation, and redundant safety layers. Thus, our Drones are capable of safe and reliable BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) flights for package delivery."
