Cleveland Clinic’s prescription drone program is flying about 20 deliveries a week from four Zipline aircraft at its Beachwood campus, the first operational figures to come out of the country’s first long-term prescription drug drone service. The charging hardware on site is built for 12.
Patients qualify if they live within five miles (8 km) of the campus, in a single-family home with a yard that is not obstructed. The aircraft cannot carry refrigerated products, controlled substances, specialty medications, or anything that needs large packaging. Inside those limits, a delivery that used to mean calling a courier and waiting hours now takes about 15 minutes.
DroneXL has covered this program twice: in July, when the launch pads in Beachwood were still going up, and on August 7, when the first packages reached patients’ lawns. The Akron Beacon Journal visited the campus and came back with the numbers nobody had published.
Four Aircraft Handle Twenty Deliveries A Week
Four Zipline aircraft operate out of Beachwood today, with charging hardware sized for 12, and together they fly roughly 20 prescription deliveries a week. Home delivery pharmacy manager Bri Robinson and pharmacy executive director Matt Soder gave those figures to the Akron Beacon Journal, which visited the campus.
That works out to five flights per aircraft per week in a service that only went live in early August. Soder expects the count to climb as the program widens.
The five-mile circle is half of what the aircraft can do. The drone flying these runs is Zipline’s Platform 2, the P2 Zip, which has a 10-mile (16 km) service radius and can move 24 miles (39 km) dock to dock. Nothing else in the fleet matches the Beachwood description: the older P1 is catapult-launched and drops packages under a parachute, while everything the Clinic and the paper describe, the winch, the droid, the self-docking charger, is Platform 2 hardware. Cleveland Clinic is flying it at half radius, which is what a first phase looks like when the cargo is medication.
The FAA’s own paperwork fills in the specs and corrects part of the local account. A February environmental reevaluation of Zipline’s Arkansas operation describes the P2 Zip as an electric vertical takeoff aircraft with five propellers that weighs 55 pounds empty and 63 pounds with a full eight-pound (3.6 kg) payload, spans 7.8 feet (2.4 m) wingtip to wingtip, transits at 330 feet (101 m) and about 47 mph (76 km/h), and never exceeds 76 mph. Each delivery hover runs roughly 75 seconds while the droid goes down and comes back up. So the five propellers in the Beacon Journal’s list belong to the aircraft. The five pounds and the 10-inch box do not, and that pairing is closer to the size of the package than the drone carrying it.
The Availability Number Matters More Than The Delivery Count
Zipline’s aircraft stayed available more than 90 percent of the time through several weeks of heavy rain and wind in Northeast Ohio, according to Robinson. The drones carry their own weather sensing and stand down for thunderstorms and blizzards. For a hospital pharmacy, that reliability figure is the whole argument.
Robinson told the paper that through the recent weather, “the drones have consistently been up greater than 90% of the time.”
A pharmacy cannot offer patients a delivery option that vanishes when the forecast turns, which is why availability, not speed, is the number that gets a service approved internally. Speed is the part patients notice. Soder’s comparison is a courier run measured in hours or days against a drone that covers the five-mile radius in about 15 minutes. Ten percent downtime is a rounding error on a burrito. On a rush antibiotic it decides whether the service is real.
Geomarking And Motion Sensing Decide Where The Package Lands
Zipline geomarks every address in the service area before the first flight, and each patient picks a landing spot from two or three the company approves on the property. If the droid sees movement underneath it, the package does not come off the tether.
The failure behavior is the part worth knowing. The droid flashes red, makes noise, and either diverts to an alternate spot or returns to the drop box, with a notification going to both the patient and the pharmacy. When it does deliver, it sets the package down from about an inch and a quarter above the ground.
The aircraft is not silent. Staff at Beachwood compared it to a faint lawnmower somewhere in the distance, which is a long way from the rustling-leaves comparison Zipline has leaned on since Platform 2 was announced. DroneXL’s 2023 breakdown of Zipline’s uneven blade spacing explains the gap. Staggering the blades pushes propeller noise into lower frequencies the ear discounts, and that trick works best for a listener in the plane of the blades and worst for one standing directly below. The patient in the backyard is standing directly below.
Rebecca Wolkoff, a Pepper Pike resident who has taken two deliveries, told the paper it “definitely felt very futuristic.”
The Exclusion List Sets The Program’s Ceiling
Refrigerated products, controlled substances, specialty medications and anything needing large packaging stay off the aircraft. Specialty drugs sit on that list even though Cleveland Clinic named them as an expansion target when the program was announced, and that gap explains why the weekly count reads 20 instead of 200.
When DroneXL covered the construction phase in July, the published roadmap ran to specialty and rush medications, lab samples, prescription meals, and surgical supplies. Each of those categories multiplies volume. None of them has a date. Soder says the program expands over the next several months and that he wants charging hardware at more Cleveland Clinic facilities, and he told the Beacon Journal there is no timeline for bringing the service to Akron. Conventional carriers keep the work they have.
Zipline’s operating record is what buys the health system its confidence here. The company told the Beacon Journal it has flown about 140 million autonomous miles with no injuries or safety accidents, and its public fact sheet puts the number above 135 million.
DroneXL’s Take
Twenty deliveries a week is a small number and I am not going to dress it up. Four aircraft, five flights each, in a metro area of two million people, while Zipline talks publicly about reaching a million deliveries a day.
Small is also the right answer for month one of a service that drops prescription drugs on a lawn. Fine. What I would tell a pharmacy director to watch is not the delivery count. It is Robinson’s 90 percent. A courier that shows up hours later is still a courier, but a drone that cannot fly in a Cleveland October is a press release with rotors.
When DroneXL dug into Zipline’s $7.6 billion valuation in January, the conclusion was that healthcare partnerships would carry the margins rather than restaurant runs. Beachwood is the first place in this country where someone is actually counting.
Zipline is not the constraint here. In February the FAA cleared the company to run up to 400 delivery trips a day, around the clock, out of a single dock in Pea Ridge, Arkansas. Beachwood does 20 in a week. The aircraft is not what is holding this program back. The formulary is.
The gap in the record is dates. Cleveland Clinic has named every category it wants to add and attached a date to none of them, and the one expansion question the Beacon Journal put directly to Soder, whether Akron gets the service, came back with no timeline. Those categories are where the volume lives. Until one of them gets a date, 20 a week is not a ramp, it is a ceiling.
Zipline and BayCare do not fly in Tampa until late 2027, which leaves Beachwood as the only US hospital system producing real utilization data for more than a year. Watch what Cleveland Clinic loads onto the aircraft between now and then. If refrigerated or specialty medications go on before BayCare’s first flight, drone delivery stops being a pharmacy experiment and starts being a line item in somebody’s budget.
A prescription landing softly in a backyard is still the best advertisement this industry gets. It just has to land every time it rains.
Sources: Akron Beacon Journal, FAA environmental reevaluation, Zipline Pea Ridge, February 20, 2026, Zipline fact sheet
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
