 How many of you are parents? I'd like to begin with a story that should resonate with many parents. It's a story about a mother who has just gone into labor. She gives birth at her local hospital, but she quickly experiences complications and begins to bleed heavily. The medical team that's caring for the mother works to stabilize her, but they soon realize that they will need more blood than their hospital blood bank has in stock. At that moment, this mother's life would be at risk in any health system in the world. She's experiencing severe postpartum hemorrhage, which is most simply defined as excessive bleeding following childbirth. This obstetric emergency is one of the leading causes of death for health systems around the world in both high and low income countries. Accounting for over 25% of all maternal deaths. As many as 7 million women suffer from postpartum hemorrhage each year. And this obstetric emergency often requires massive transfusion of more than the total volume of blood in a woman's body to help stabilize a patient. Fortunately for the mother, she lives in Rwanda where the hospital immediately placed an order for delivery of blood with zipline by drone. She fully recovered and she's now raising a healthy son. This is a video of the first delivery of blood that zipline made to a hospital in Rwanda. Zipline is the automated logistics company that I co-founded. And we use drones to make life-saving deliveries on demand, serving millions of people around the world. This may sound like science fiction to many of you, as it does to the women in the foreground of this video. But drone delivery has become commonplace in many of the countries where zipline works. So why deliver blood by drone? The short answer is this was the government of Rwanda's vision. I first traveled to Rwanda in 2015, searching for a launch partner for the technology that we were developing. When I arrived, I was interested in delivering a whole range of medicines and vaccines by drone. However, when I met with the Minister of Health, Dr. Agnes Ben Aguajo, she was adamant that while many products would benefit, drone delivery of blood would be most impactful. The government of Rwanda unsurprisingly understood the needs of their health system better than my team and I ever could. And their guidance was essential to the early success of our work. So in partnership with Dr. Ben Aguajo and her team, we worked to design the world's first national-scale drone delivery system in Rwanda. We established zipline's first distribution center in late 2016 in the southwest of the country. From this location, we can serve a radius of about 80 kilometers, covering an area of over 20,000 square kilometers. That area includes the first 21 hospitals that the Rwanda Ministry of Health contracted zipline to serve. After establishing our partnership with government, I lived in Rwanda for almost three years, working to support the launch and growth of our operations. During that time, I came to understand what gave Dr. Ben Aguajo the conviction that we should start by delivering blood. Every day, having timely access to blood of the right type and insufficient quantities is literally a matter of life and death for every health system in the world. But blood products are also challenging to manage. There are many types. They have short shelf lives, and it's difficult to accurately forecast demand for each blood type before patients need transfusion. This is a complex problem. Traditionally, health supply chains struggle, balancing the trade-off between increasing access and reducing waste. This trade-off is one that hospitals have encountered every day for centuries. Now, if you want to maximize access, you stock lots of products in large quantities at every health facility so that patients always have the medicine they need. But a consequence of this is that you end up throwing out a lot of expired inventory, which can be unaffordable for most health systems. If you want to minimize waste, you stock fewer products and less of each product at health facilities. But then health workers sometimes don't have the product they need to treat a patient. Just-in-time delivery by drone allows us to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of health supply chains. The Rwandan health system now stores blood regionally at zipline distribution centers and uses drones to make deliveries on demand to hospitals in the average of less than 30 minutes from the time they place an order. This is a video that can give you a sense of the process for just such a delivery. Just-in-time delivery by drone has allowed Rwanda to achieve something that was previously unheard of. The health system has simultaneously eliminated stockouts and waste for a vital medical product group. Because hospitals know that they can rely on quickly receiving a delivery whenever needed, they hold less blood in stock. However, this does not mean that demand for blood products has gone down. Better access has led to a significant increase in the use of blood. Use of common products is increased by around 10%. While use of rare blood products that were previously less available has increased by over 175%. This leads to faster turnover and inventory. And over the past two years, virtually zero units of blood have expired at any of the hospitals that zipline serves. We have completed over 16,000 deliveries of medical products. Over 4,000 of those deliveries were for emergencies. And of those 4,000 deliveries, behind everyone is a patient like the mother in our story. Rwanda is rapidly expanding drone delivery. The health system launched a project earlier this year to put almost every health facility in the country within range. And they've expanded the list of products available for delivery by drone to include all essential medicines, vaccines, and blood. The government of Ghana similarly recognized the value that drones could bring to their health system and launched a partnership to establish the world's largest drone delivery network, serving over 2,000 health facilities. Soon, almost every medical professional in both Ghana and Rwanda will be able to receive any product they need to treat a patient within 30 to 45 minutes, no matter where they're located. We plan to do for the entire health supply chain what we've already done for blood. So to put in perspective the importance of this, let's consider what's happening at a global scale. Over 1 billion people lack reliable access to essential medical products, which is closely correlated with outcomes in key areas like child health. Over 3 million children die each year from conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to essential medical products. Many people might assume that this challenge around access might be limited to low-income countries in places like Africa. However, this is a global problem. I come from a medical family. My father's a doctor and my mother's a nurse. My parents were some of the only medical professionals practicing in their specialty in the rural part of the United States where I was born. Many communities in the U.S. struggle with limited access to health care, and the disparity in access between urban and rural areas is a common challenge for countries around the world. Most of the people in this room probably live in cities. So consider how would your experience of health care be different if you lived in a rural part of your country? Just last summer, newspapers in the U.S. were running headlines about drug shortages and stock outs. A recent survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that over 90% of emergency doctors in the U.S. said that they lacked access to some vital medicines. And over 40% said that that lack of access had negatively impacted the health of their patients. I'd like to share another patient story with you. This one is about a 47-year-old man who was recently diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. Between his job and a child in school, both he and his wife lead busy lives. He could order his medication by mail, but it's so valuable that he worries what would happen if he wasn't at home to receive delivery. And at best, parcel carriers, delivery windows are several hours long, which means he would need to take time off work if he was going to receive the delivery at home. So instead, he spends hours driving every month to a pharmacy to pick up the specialty medication that he needs to manage his health. Like many patients with chronic diseases, this man is frustrated. There isn't enough time to both properly manage his health while also working and spending time with family. Sometimes he doesn't refill his prescriptions on time, and he was recently hospitalized as a result of an incident that was related to a gap in treatment. Everyone, even those living in rural areas, should have instant access to any medical product they need. Drone delivery can provide patients like the man in our story with that access. We can deliver medications directly to patients' homes, either on demand or scheduled for the exact time that's convenient for them. At best, that level of access exists in only a few major cities today, and that lack of access leads to all kinds of hidden costs, and in too many cases, tragic human stories. We can do better. Logistics should no longer be a barrier to accessing health care. For the vast majority of communities, if a health facility lacks a product to treat a patient, a drone could affordably deliver that product in time to provide the best available standard of care. I envision a future where doctors will never lack access to essential medical products, and individuals will never struggle to manage their health while also leading full lives. This future is within reach, and our team is working tirelessly to achieve it, but it's too big a vision for one company to realize alone. We need help from the people in this room. I hope that you will cast aside old ways of thinking about these challenges, and join me to radically reimagine how drone delivery can help enable equitable access to health care. Thank you.