UPS Announces Expansion Of Its Drone Delivery Program

Last week, UPS announced an expansion of its B2B drone delivery program titled UPS Flight. The expansion included three items focused upon the healthcare industry. First, UPS began a:

"... new drone delivery service in support of the University of Utah Health hospital campuses, in partnership with Matternet. The University of Utah campus program will involve drone deliveries of samples and other cargo, similar to the program originally introduced at WakeMed Hospital in North Carolina."

The second item included and agreement with:

"... with CVS Health to develop a variety of drone delivery use cases for business-to consumer applications. The program will include evaluation of delivery of prescriptions and retail products to the homes of CVS customers."

The third item included a partnership:

"... with wholesale pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen... The collaboration will initially deploy the UPS Flight Forward drone airline to transport certain pharmaceuticals, supplies and records to qualifying medical campuses served by AmerisourceBergen across the United States, with plans to then expand its use to other sites of care."

UPS Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Scott Price said:

“When we launched UPS Flight Forward, we said we would move quickly to scale this business – now the country’s first and only fully-certified drone airline... We started with a hospital campus environment and are now expanding scale and use-cases. UPS Flight Forward will work with new customers in other industries to design additional solutions for a wide array of last-mile and urgent delivery challenges.”