Use of drone to improve healthcare efficiency and sustainability

Following the Industry/Hospital 4.0 paradigm, the cost and effectiveness of the services offered by a modern Hospital can be dramatically improved by resorting to technology and by putting the patients (and the medical practitioners) at the center, thus improving their care experience (and work time), improving efficiency and paying more attention to the environment. In this paper, we focus on how to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness of intra-operative consultations; instead of letting the pathologist roam around several hospitals, each provided with complex and costly equipment (e.g., cryostat) and professional resources (e.g., specialized technicians), we propose an approach where drones are used to move biological material (non-fixed biological samples) from small hospitals and clinics to a larger hospital, provided with the necessary infrastructure for conducting intra-operative consultations. In particular, we aim at demonstrating that technology can help creating value by minimizing inefficiencies due to under-usage of professional resources (e.g., the pathologist should maximize the amount of time spent doing his/her job, and such a job should be done in an environment where the pathologist is not alone) and assets (e.g., the complex infrastructure required to manage intraoperative consultations should not be replicated in every facility), and transportations of goods (e.g., increasing efficiency by using lightweight devices to transport samples instead of medical cars to transport specialized practitioners).