By Healthcare Facilities Today

The total savings to the healthcare sector, if it adopted more environmentally sustainable operations, could exceed $5.4 billion over five years, and $15 billion over 10 years, according to a Health Care Research Collaborative study.

The study looked at nine hospitals/health systems that developed greener operations over the last five years. Each of the nine health systems and hospitals in the study documented their savings in a number of areas, including waste management, energy use reduction, and changes in their Operating Room (OR) supply procurement.  Each hospital found significant savings, even those that made initial investments to adopt the programs, says the Healthier Hospitals Initiative, which sponsored the study along with Health Care Without Harm through grants from The Commonwealth Fund and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The savings were projected to last five years or more.

Below are highlights from the study, illustrating the specific approaches cost savings realized by the study hospitals, and projected savings for the entire health care sector.

Energy
Approach: Hospitals reporting energy savings employed interventions like lighting upgrades; installing high-efficiency electric motors, occupancy sensors for public areas, high-efficiency boilers, central plant chiller replacement, solar film on windows; reducing air changes and temperature in the ORs, using steam insulating jackets and off-hours shutdown.

Savings: The total five-year net cost savings realized as a result of these activities resulted in a savings of $0.72 per square foot.  Nationwide adoption of these changes would results in an estimated five-year net cost savings of $0.98 billion.

Waste
Approach: Streamline waste disposal processes to include recycling, reducing package and trash, such as paper, food refuse, and non-infectious garbage that is inadvertently mixed with medical waste.  

Savings: The studied hospitals found savings of $0.397 per adjusted patient day by making these changes.  Nationwide adoption of these waste management changes would net $0.71 billion in savings over five years.

Operating Rooms
ORs account for about 33 percent of all hospital supply costs, and have large costs for energy use and waste management.

Approach: Address OR practices such as using disposable products. Seven hospitals in the study contracted with a service that collected used single-use medical devices (SUDs), determined which could be reused, cleaned and sterilized, then sold them back to the hospitals at a reduced price compared with new multi-use devices.

Savings: The average annual net savings per procedure realized by hospitals as a result of the SUD utilization activities was $12.04/procedure, which does not include waste disposal savings that may have resulted.  The authors stated that if hospitals throughout the U.S. were to adopt the SUD utilization changes, the cost savings would be $0.54 billion annually from decreased new device purchasing alone. Over five years, the savings would total $2.7 billion.

Approach:  Staff examined OR packs that had been pre-formulated for specific procedures, identified items in them that were often not used and thrown away after the packs were opened, and asked their suppliers to leave those items out.

Savings:  The average net cost savings realized by the two hospitals as a result of the OR kit reformulation activities was $4.33 per procedure in the year of the reformulation.  If hospitals throughout the U.S. were to adopt the changes to reformulate OR packs implemented by the exemplar hospitals, the cost savings would be $0.19 billion in year one and $1.02 billion over five years, the study authors found, based on approximately 45,000,000 surgical cases a year.

Read Can Sustainable Hospitals Help Bend the Health Care Cost Curve?