Acute cardiac care & resuscitationResearch article
Rural–urban differences for integrated first responder and drone automated external defibrillator delivery in North Carolina
- computational modeling study
Authors' conclusion
When optimized for 3-, 5- or 7-minute AED arrival, proposed FR- and drone-based AED deployment would improve AED arrival times in urban areas more than rural areas. Additional optimization approaches are needed to reduce inequality between urban and rural defibrillation arrival times in areas with large geographic variation.
Study context
- Population
- Out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in North Carolina counties with ≥10 OHCAs per year in both rural and urban census tracts, January 2013 to December 2019OHCAs in 19 counties · urban 5,754 · rural 3,201
- Participants
- 8,955 arrests
- Comparison
- proposed first responder (FR) and drone-based automated external defibrillator (AED) delivery program vs historical AED arrival, in urban vs rural areas
- urbann = 5,754
- ruraln = 3,201
Main finding
As reported in the abstract
Median historical county-level median AED arrival time
Further findings
Median AED arrival time with drone-AED networks optimized for 5-minute AED arrival
| Outcome | urban | rural |
|---|---|---|
| Five-minute AED arrival rates (historical to optimized for 5-minute arrival) | ||
| historical | 19.9% [IQR: 15.7%-23.2%] | 7.6% [IQR: 4.6%-9.5%] |
| optimized | 75.0% [IQR: 70.9%-85.6%] | 15.8% [IQR: 11.3%-32.9%] |
Rural-urban response gap with optimization for 7-minute AED arrival
- Optimizing for 7-minute AED arrival increased the rural-urban response gap to a lesser extent
Original publication
Rural–urban differences for integrated first responder and drone automated external defibrillator delivery in North Carolina. Am Heart J. Published 11 September 2026. doi:10.1016/j.ahj.2026.107604
Summarised from the published abstract; every number is checked against it