Zipline drones will deliver medicine to communities in Utah
Zipline has teamed up with a healthcare provider servicing the Intermountain Region in the US to deliver medicine to customers using its drones. The company has started doing drone deliveries to select Intermountain Healthcare patients in the Salt Lake Valley area. For now, it can only do drops for local communities within several miles of its distribution center. Zipline intends to add more centers over the next five years, though, so it can eventually expand beyond Salt Lake Valley and deliver medicine throughout Utah.
As TechCrunch notes, Zipline has long been deploying drones for delivery in Africa, and it wasn’t until the pandemic that it started doing drops in the US. In 2020, it teamed up with Novant Health to ferry personal protective gear and other types of medical equipment to frontline healthcare workers tending to COVID-19 patients in North Carolina. Later that year, it signed a deal with Walmart to deliver health and wellness supplies to customers near the retailer’s headquarters in northwest Arkansas.
In June this year, the FAA authorized Zipline to conduct long range on-demand commercial drone deliveries in the US. The company said that the certification it received from the agency allows it …read more
