- Drone programme launches February 2020 in partnership with Matternet and builds on UPS Healthcare and Life Sciences strategy to support US hospital transport services with innovative logistics capabilities
- UPS scaling programme to help care providers enhance patient experience and outcomes
- UCSD tests with the FAA will add further knowledge concerning drone applications under DOT UAS Integration Pilot Program
ATLANTA – UPS Healthcare (NYSE: UPS) today announced the expansion of its industry-leading UPS Flight Forward™ drone delivery programme to the University of California San Diego Health system. UPS Flight Forward™, in partnership with Matternet, will launch the health campus delivery programme to transport various medical products between health centres and labs using unmanned aerial vehicles. The new service will begin in February 2020.
The project calls for medical professionals at Jacobs Medical Center, located on the east health campus of UC San Diego in La Jolla, to load medical parcels, such as blood samples or documents, into a secure drone container used for the flight.
The drones will follow predetermined flight paths, initially between Jacobs Medical Center and special landing sites at Moores Cancer Center, located less than a mile away and within visual line of sight under the FAA's Part 107 rules and then subsequently at the Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine (CALM), which is near the Jacobs Medical Center. The flights will take only minutes to complete and will be monitored by remote operators.
In May 2018, the FAA designated the City of San Diego as one of nine lead participants in the regulators' Integration Pilot Program (IPP). One of the city's proposed missions was to test the use of drones in transporting lab specimens and pharmaceuticals throughout its health system.
In September 2019, UPS Flight Forward, the company's drone airline subsidiary, received the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Part 135 Standard certification with authorisation for the use of unmanned aircraft systems to operate a drone delivery programme at WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh, N.C.
Enhancing the UPS Smart Global Logistics Network to support hospitals and other healthcare organisations remains a key element of the company's transformation strategy. Healthcare and life science logistics is a priority segment for UPS, and the company continues to build new relationships and deploy technologies to deliver better patient care with a streamlined logistics and supply chain.
About UPS Healthcare
UPS Healthcare delivers unparalleled healthcare logistics expertise to its customers around the world. UPS Healthcare has 11+ million square feet of cGMP and GDP-compliant healthcare distribution space globally. Its services include inventory management, cold chain packaging and shipping, storage and fulfilment of medical devices, and lab and clinical trial logistics. UPS Healthcare's global infrastructure, its UPS® Premier visibility service, its track and trace technology, and its global quality system are well-suited to meeting today's complex logistics demands for the pharmaceutical, medical device, and laboratory diagnostic industries.
