Mayo Clinic is partnering with Zipline to provide drone delivery service for medications and supplies directly to patients' homes as part of its advanced hospital-at-home program.
The health system will integrate Zipline's Platform 2 drone system into its campuses in Jacksonville, Florida, and Rochester, Minnesota. Mayo Clinic will use Zipline’s zero-emission, autonomous drones for quick deliveries, the organizations announced Wednesday.
Through the drone service, if a caregiver notices a need for an acute medical intervention, Zipline can deliver medications and supplies from the hospital to a person’s home within minutes.
Mayo Clinic's Advanced Care at Home model has since seen 2,600 patients to date.
Mayo Clinic now joins a handful of other health systems working with Zipline to deliver medications and supplies to patients. The drone delivery and logistics company has signed agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Health, MultiCare, Michigan Medicine, OhioHealth and WellSpan to use P2, as well as retailers including Walmart.
In April, Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston inked a partnership to deploy Zipline’s instant home delivery service, making autonomous drone deliveries of specialty prescriptions and medical supplies directly to patients’ homes beginning in 2026.
Last fall, Cleveland Clinic announced its drone delivery service to bring certain medications directly to patients’ homes starting in 2025.
The service initially will be used to send specialty medicines and other prescriptions to patients’ homes from more than a dozen Cleveland Clinic locations across northeast Ohio, the health system said in October.
The program will eventually expand to include delivery of lab samples, prescription meals, medical and surgical supplies and items for hospital-at-home services. Most of these shipments would typically be sent via automotive courier or ground delivery, Cleveland Clinic said.
Michigan Medicine said last March that it expects that with the use of Zipline’s new drone delivery service, the medical system will be able to more than double the number of prescriptions filled annually through its in-home pharmacy. The move is part of UM Health’s goal of increasing patient access to specialty pharmacy services, executives said.
Intermountain will use Zipline’s P2 to deliver prescriptions to patients’ homes in the Salt Lake City metro area. Intermountain first rolled out drone delivery service with Zipline in October 2022. The fixed-wing drones first delivered specialty pharmaceuticals and certain over-the-counter medications in South Jordan, Utah.
Zipline says its P2 system is now set to be used in 11 states and reach more than 30 million people in the U.S. in the next few years.