Desperately seeking medical help, a teenager in active, obstructed labor risked her life to walk 19 miles from her village in Liberia to a clinic in Monrovia. Fortunately, Andrea Weitz, MD, MPH, TTUHSC emergency medicine resident, was there in 2018 to successfully deliver the baby girl. The experience brought home to Weitz the urgency and extent of the health care delivery problems facing much of Africa, where isolated villages are cut off by impassable roads.

Weitz looked to the sky for a solution. Drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, might not have helped the laboring girl, but because they can fly above rutted, unpaved roads, they could deliver much-needed medications, vaccines and other supplies to remote villages. In Sierra Leone, for instance, where maternal mortality rates are soaring, drones could deliver blood to women experiencing postpartum hemorrhaging as well as drugs to stop the bleeding.

Weitz is passionate about broadening access to health care, whether in African villages or remote towns in the United States. In West Texas alone, she noted, some 450 rural communities are “pharmacy deserts,” meaning they lack nearby pharmacies. Drones, she reasons, could address the problem.

As a business venture, Weitz founded DronesRx. The startup company proposes to use drones to deliver medications, supplies and telehealth opportunities to communities in northwest Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.