Duke Health researchers are dispatching drones carrying automated external defibrillators to live cardiac arrest calls in Clemmons, North Carolina, the first study of its kind in the United States. When a 911 call reports a cardiac arrest inside the coverage zone, a drone launches alongside the ambulance, and the race that follows is the whole point: the aircraft is expected to win by minutes that decide whether the patient survives.
The Drone Launches The Moment The 911 Call Lands
The dispatch flow adds one aircraft to a process everyone already knows. A 911 dispatcher takes the cardiac arrest call, coordinates with a drone pilot, and an AED-equipped drone launches autonomously toward the address while EMS rolls the traditional way.
The aircraft cruises at 200 feet (61 m), descends to 100 feet (30 m) over the scene, and winches the defibrillator down to the ground. The dispatcher then walks the bystander through grabbing the device and using it, the same way dispatchers already coach CPR over the phone.
The coverage zone spans a 4.5 mile (7.2 km) radius in Forsyth County, with a sister site in James City County, Virginia. The drone technology comes from Hovecon Consulting, and the study is funded by the American Heart Association with more than a dozen partner institutions.
“By integrating drone technology into emergency care, we’re working to close the critical gap between cardiac arrest and treatment,” said Dr. Monique Starks, the Duke cardiologist leading the study.
The Survival Math Leaves No Room For Traffic
The numbers behind this study are brutal and simple. An AED applied within 2 to 3 minutes of collapse pushes survival rates toward 70 percent. EMS typically arrives in 8 to 10 minutes. Every minute in between costs survival odds, and no ambulance can beat physics and traffic lights.
The American Heart Association, which funds this study, counts more than 350,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the United States every year, and most of them end in death precisely because help arrives late. The bystander AED exists for that gap, but the device only works if one happens to hang on a wall nearby. The drone turns every address in the coverage zone into a building with an AED on the wall.
The study’s target is delivery in under 5 minutes for more than half of its cases, and earlier projections put the response time improvement at up to 40 percent. If the drone consistently lands a defibrillator 4 or 5 minutes before the ambulance, the machine is not a gadget. It is the difference between a funeral and a discharge.
The rural angle gives the study its edge. The registered trial explicitly targets cardiac arrests in rural America, where EMS response distances stretch longest and survival rates run lowest. A drone does not care that the nearest ambulance station sits 15 minutes of two-lane road away.
The researchers are treating this phase as the proving ground for something bigger: a large, multi-center randomized clinical trial that would measure effectiveness, cost, and how the model works in rural areas against urban ones. That is the study that could turn drone AEDs from an experiment into a standard line item in county EMS budgets.
Forsyth County Graduated From Demo To Dispatch
DroneXL covered Forsyth County when this was still a demonstration in 2024, with staged flights proving the concept. In November 2025 the program delivered an AED during a real emergency for the first time in US history. Now it runs as standard procedure on live calls, and national newscasts are picking up the story.
The progression matches the pattern this industry keeps repeating. Sweden proved the concept in January 2022, when a drone-delivered AED reached a 71-year-old man in three minutes and he survived. Cleveland Clinic starts flying prescriptions to patients’ homes this summer. Every year the medical drone story moves one step closer to routine.
Medical deliveries by drone keep stacking up, and the pace is accelerating. Yesterday we were talking about medicine bottles landing in backyards in Ohio. Today it is defibrillators winched down to cardiac arrests in North Carolina. The cargo keeps getting more critical, and the drones keep proving they can carry it.
DroneXL’s Take
Here’s what nobody is saying out loud, the bystander is still the weak link, and the researchers know it. A defibrillator on the lawn saves nobody if the person standing next to it panics. That is why the dispatcher-coaching piece of this study matters as much as the flight time, and why the survival data from real calls will be worth more than a thousand staged demos.
But the direction is set, and it only points one way. So what comes next? Half joking, half serious: the nurse rides the drone. Except that is not even a joke anymore. Jump Aero, a California company, has spent years designing an electric aircraft whose entire mission is flying a paramedic to the emergency faster than any ground vehicle. First we flew the medicine, now we fly the defibrillator, and the industry is already building the aircraft that flies the responder.
Watch the multi-center trial that follows this study. If the survival numbers hold across cities and rural counties, the question stops being whether drones belong in EMS and becomes which county budget approves them first.
Sources: Duke Health, ABC11, WFSB
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
