Decarbonizing the healthcare industry is a crucial part of mitigating climate change. But for healthcare organizations, cutting back on emissions depends heavily on being able to accurately track those emissions in the first place–a massive undertaking in systems this complex.
“A major barrier is lacking the tools for doing carbon accounting that are specific to health care—especially the supply chain, which is the hardest thing to measure,” said Jodi Sherman, MD, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. She also serves as Medical Director of Sustainability for Yale New Haven Health Center for Sustainable Healthcare.
Sherman and her colleagues are developing software to allow hospital systems to track emissions and target pollution, waste, and inefficiency. The tool computes and tracks the greenhouse gas footprint associated with a health system’s supply chain.
Faced with thousands of products in that supply chain, the researchers could not take a bottom- up approach of quantifying emissions for the components of each. Instead, they looked at emissions of the various sectors involved in manufacturing a good or service.
“Until manufacturers provide standardized, transparent information, this is the accepted approach to dealing with large systems,” Sherman explained.
This information will eventually tie emissions from the clinical supply chain to patients’ outcomes, allowing health care organizations to study in granular detail how clinical services might best be decarbonized while maintaining well-being, safety and quality.
After developing the tool using data from Yale New Haven Health, the team is working to validate it in other health systems and to make the software more user-friendly. They will also ensure that the data it provides is in line with widely used corporate carbon reporting standards so organizations can meet forthcoming reporting standards. It can also eventually enable health care organizations to make comparisons to help identify best practices that can then be shared and scaled up.