SALISBURY -- Novant Health is taking their care to the skies. Tuesday, the health care system unveiled their state of the art helicopter at its new home in Rowan County.

Stretchers, syringes and monitors line the walls of the newest mode of transportation for Novant Health, but you'll also find radios and air traffic controls sitting in the front of the mobile hospital room.

“Time is essential and we like all the other helicopter services are dedicated to getting the patients where they need to go as quick as we can,” helicopter EMT Amy Cherry said.

According to Novant Health, every two hours someone in North Carolina dies from a stroke. The medical facility say they hope to change that with a faster response.

“We wanted to have a central location and we have Novant Health Presbyterian in Charlotte, which is our trauma center there and we also have Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem which is a huge facility and they’re both comprehensive stroke centers. We wanted to find a place that was centrally located to that footprint and Rowan County to fit the bill,” Dari Caldwell from Novant Health Rowan Medical Center said.

Novant Health Medflight will cover a 150 mile radius, making every minute count, no matter what the emergency.

“We don’t have to deal with traffic or stoplights or crazy drivers and we can just get the patient where they need to go as quick as possible,” Cherry said.

With this new helicopter, they’re actually able to fit two stretchers inside, getting the maximum amount of people from the trauma situation to the hospital.

“The configuration is a little better because we are going to be two patient capable and that’s really really neat. We won’t need to separate family members, we can actually take those two people together,” Cherry said.

The helicopter can travel up to 158 miles per hour. Novant Health officials estimate they will transport 300 to 400 patients in just the first year of service.