The journey of the EpiShuttle started over 10 years ago in West Africa with the largest Ebola epidemic in history. The situation was so dire that many healthcare workers came from abroad to lend a hand. Between July and October 2014, 17 international healthcare professionals got infected with Ebola and had to be repatriated.

Thus arose the problem: How to safely transport those international healthcare workers back home for treatment? The soft-shell transport isolators available at the time were inadequate to do such. They were prone to leakage, not certified for air/ground travel and had limited advanced care treatment options. There was no other option but to use them with cumbersome personal protective equipment (PPE). What awaited the infected healthcare workers and their colleagues tasked to transport them was several exhausting hours, trying to best protect themselves and the patient with insufficient isolation equipment.

The need for a better option for isolating and transporting patients with highly infectious diseases was evident. Faced with these challenges, one of EpiGuard’s founders and EpiShuttle inventors, Dr. Fridtjof Heyerdahl, partnered up with fellow healthcare professionals and engineers to design a better solution and address the operational shortcomings of the medical isolation transport market. The result was the EpiShuttle, a state-of-the-art patient isolation transport unit which is completely sealed thus removing the need for PPE, is certified for air/ground travel and enables advanced medical care to be provided during transport. As Dr. Heyerdahl has stated:

“We aimed to revolutionize the procedures in transport of contagious patients.”

Fast forward 10 years later to 2024, this revolution has resulted in over 300 EpiShuttles being adopted in over 30 countries, with over a 1000 transports performed, and countless patients and healthcare professionals protected. The EpiShuttle is now the industry standard globally, having raised the bar for innovation and quality in the patient isolation transport field.