Healthcare Matters

The move towards a greener national supply chain took a giant and timely step forward last week. MedAssets, Premier, Novation, HealthTrust and Amerinet have wisely decided to standardize their approach to qualifying suppliers for environmental friendliness. In case you’ve been living with me under a rock, it’s now known as “sustainability” –-and a big enough chunk of the industry has finally agreed on a simple, scalable approach to measuring levels of commitment.

Along with pressure from Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit organization aimed at embedding sustainable practices in the industry, the Healthcare Supply Chain Association (HSCA –formerly HIGPA) successfully made a case to the industry’s largest GPOs. The top 5, representing about 90% of the volume transacted in the GPO market, put their differences aside and did the right thing. Sometimes, doing the right thing is easy and despite rhetoric to the contrary, this is clearly one of those cases. Without a standardized approach, nothing scalable was going to happen and the sustainability message would have suffered. But not as much as the suppliers, hospitals and GPOs would have. Can you imagine all of them developing and trying to force compliance around their own scorecards? In fact, they saved themselves and everyone else a lot of pain.

The first version of the “sustainability questionnaire” being developed uses Kaiser’s originally developed scorecard as a model –and it is limited to just 13 questions. It is focused on non-electronic products and the questioning is all about exposing a products’ energy use, water consumption and disposability. The next version, which will include standardized questions for electronic products, is in development and will follow suit. Although the GPOs can implement the questionnaire on their own timetables and interpret the answers separately, the point is, everyone is going to be singing from the same sheet of music.

“People are starting to understand that sustainability is a critical strategic opportunity — it’s no longer tied only to corporate social responsibility,” said Beth Eckl of Practice Greenhealth. “It’s really a smart business decision for health care across a spectrum — it’s uniquely tied to the mission of the work that’s done [in health care].”

Source: GreenBiz.com

—Tom Finn