Hospital wants to use drones to transplant organs

Chennai - Dr Balakrishnan said that a viable alternative is for hospitals to join hands and operate drones to transport hearts and other organs along a well-defined corridor in cities such as Chennai, which has emerged as the heart transplant capital of India.

India's leading centre for heart transplants, which has achieved a significant milestone of carrying out over 50 successful heart transplants, is toying with the idea of deploying drones to transport the organs.
Dr K.R. Balakrishnan, director, cardiac sciences, Fortis Centre for Heart Failure & Transplant, at Fortis Malar hospital here, told Khaleej Times on Wednesday that the issue of transporting crucial organs such as the heart is becoming extremely difficult in India.
"We have been using air ambulances for transporting hearts from different cities in south India to Chennai for transplants, but the industry is unorganised," he said. "In fact, it is worse than hiring autorickshaws. Operators fix prices arbitrarily and it is frightening the way prices are raised." Even the facilities for patients are atrocious inside the aircraft.
Dr Balakrishnan said that a viable alternative is for hospitals to join hands and operate drones to transport hearts and other organs along a well-defined corridor in cities such as Chennai, which has emerged as the heart transplant capital of India.
"We pioneered the concept of the green corridor, where we take the help of the traffic police to ensure an exclusive, traffic-free corridor from the airport to our hospital," he pointed out. "Though our hospital is located 15km from Chennai airport, the police ensure that ambulances carrying organs reach our centre in less than 15 minutes, sometimes in as less as eight minutes."
The green corridor concept has now been extended to other cities including Mumbai and Pune, where hospitals in coordination with the local traffic police ensure that roads are cleared for vehicles carrying hearts for transplantation.
But Dr Balakrishnan feels it might be difficult to ensure such corridors with the number of heart transplants increasingly sharply in India. "Today people literally shower flowers over the ambulances carrying hearts and clear the roads," he said. "But if the frequency of these events increases I am not sure whether they will be so receptive."
The only alternative is to deploy drones, which can swiftly and safely carry the hearts to hospitals, where patients are waiting for transplants. Of course, the Indian government, the security agencies and state and local authorities will have to approve the use of drones, but just as the traffic police have cooperated in laying down green corridors, it would be possible to get security clearances for the proposed drone corridors, he added.
Dr Balakrishnan, 60 - who has carried out 58 heart transplants and thousands of other heart surgeries in his career as a cardiac surgeon spanning more than three decades - recently suggested to the Indian government that it should exempt air ambulance operators from paying taxes on aviation fuel to bring down the costs of heart transplants.
The Fortis Malar hospital ranks among the top three hospitals in Asia in terms of the number of heart transplants it has done. During the first eight months of 2015, it has carried out 21 heart transplants and with 54 such transplants in a span of five years, it is today the largest centre for heart transplants in India.
Every year about 40 heart transplants are done in India, but Dr Balakrishnan feels this number can easily be raised to 500 or even more in about two years.
"It is very distressing to see the number of hearts - from brain dead persons - being wasted because of lack of infrastructure to transport them to patients waiting for transplants," says Dr Balakrishnan.
Of the 54 heart transplants done at Forits Malar in Chennai, 13 were on foreigners, including two Pakistanis and a Russian infant.
Transplants are usually done on heart failure patients and those whose organs have failed to respond to angiographies, by-pass surgeries, etc. Patients having undergone the transplants are also living longer and enjoying a better quality of life.
nithin@khaleejtimes.com

• India