Abstract
Objectives
Transport of blood tubes is mainly by car or pneumatic transport. The transportation of blood tubes by drones is a novel approach for rapid transportation of blood tubes over long distances. However, limited data on the stability of biochemical, coagulation and hematological parameters is available after transport of blood tubes by drone.
Methods
To investigate the effect of drone transport on the stability of blood parameters, four test flights were performed. Blood was drawn from 20 healthy individuals and 39 of the most frequently measured blood parameters were compared between 4 groups; immediate measurement (control), late measurement, transport by car and transport by drone. Total allowable error (TAE) of the EFLM Biological Variation Database was used to determine the clinical relevance of significant differences.
Results
The majority of blood parameters were not affected by drone transport. Eight of the measured parameters showed significant differences between all the groups; glucose, phosphate, potassium, chloride, hemoglobin, platelet count, activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD). A clinically relevant increase for LD after transport and a decrease for glucose values in time and after transport compared with the control group was shown.
Conclusions
Transportation of blood tubes from healthy individuals by drones has a limited clinically relevant effect. From the 39 investigated blood parameters only LD and glucose showed a clinically relevant effect.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Medical Drone Service for the technical assistance with the drone, all volunteers who participated in this study and Erna Lenters-Westra, Jan van der Kolk and Mireille Edens for their advice.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: Authors state no conflict of interest.
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Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individuals included in this study.
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Ethical approval: The local Institutional Review Board deemed the study exempt from review.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cclm-2021-0513).
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