Sponsored – B. Braun– June 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Introducing sustainable practices into the healthcare space is not only imperative to protect the environment, but also necessary to optimize and improve the healthcare supply chain. For many, sustainability and emissions reduction can feel like a nebulous, constantly moving target, especially when they don’t understand how to move towards sustainable practices.
That’s where the data comes in!
In a recent podcast, Jenna Agins, the Assistant Director for Energy and Sustainability for NYU Langone Health system, and JoAnna Abrams, the CEO of MindClick, spoke to The Journal of Healthcare Contracting about sustainability in the healthcare industry, the collaboration between NYU Langone Health and MindClick, and the large role that data plays in improving sustainable practices.
Reducing carbon emissions at NYU Langone Health
Through a partnership with MindClick, NYU Langone is working towards more sustainable practices by leveraging its collected data. MindClick is a sustainability data and analytics company that helps their customers tap into quality data and analytics that will help to measure and drive progress for the sustainability of products purchased by health systems.
MindClick also partners with suppliers like B. Braun to gather data about their products and overall operations. Abrams said, “We help translate that information into a format that people, like Jenna, can use to track their progress and collaborate to make modifications to the ways in which products are brought to market that support their sustainability goals.”
Sustainability is a team sport, requiring participation from both providers and suppliers to be effective. When these organizations are equipped with the data that they need to make the necessary adjustments, it makes a significant impact on supply chain practices, as well as the cultures of these organizations, leading to more sustainability down the road.
Agins said, “We have a very substantial carbon neutrality goal for [NYU Langone Health]. That means all parts of the health system need to be working in tandem towards reaching those goals. This encompasses every part of our operations, which means tackling our supply chain, the largest portion of our Scope 3 emissions. We are developing a comprehensive carbon inventory that includes those Scope 3 emissions, so that we can understand where we can and should be making changes and progress quickly.”
Her team will then use the data collected to develop long-term goals that will contribute to NYU Langone’s carbon neutrality goal and “more aggressively target embodied carbon” in all of their purchases and operations.
Collaborating for sustainability
One of the challenges that the team at NYU Langone faces each year is amassing the necessary data tied to individual SKUs or items to avoid certain dangerous chemicals, as well as the ability to track how much they were spending in specific product categories that meet the minimum performance threshold for those products.
Abrams said, “This is an enormous undertaking – there are not enough resources to go to each supplier and get into the level of SKU detail in a way that you can trust the confidence and the quality of the data, and then finally submit your own reporting without the help of an organization like MindClick. We came to support NYU Langone in pulling that data together, ensuring the quality of it, and helping their team produce the analytics that they were looking for.”
The team at NYU Langone has been committed to reducing the “chemicals of concern” in their furniture and other furnishings for quite a while, but any organization with over 13 million square feet of space would have trouble completing the task on any comprehensive level.
“Our Interiors team is really committed to reaching its goals around these issues,” Agins said. We’re a health system, so the health of our staff and patients in the facilities in which they work or are being treated is paramount for us. We’ve been working towards these long-term goals, but it becomes increasingly challenging as we continue to grow as a health system.”
She said that Abrams and the rest of her team at MindClick were able to step in to show the impact of the choices the organization is making as a whole. “Who are our best suppliers? How can we move more of our business towards those suppliers that are meeting the criteria?”
MindClick has tapped into a way for suppliers to commit to eliminating any known chemicals of concern, which is only one of the metrics under the environmental sustainability umbrella. The biggest obstacle that healthcare organizations have faced in their sustainability practices is getting the data on the quality of the purchases and their choices in suppliers.
Abrams says that information and data they have collected has helped distributors and manufacturers better support organizations like NYU Langone Health to meet those goals.
She said, “The distributors we’re working with have struggled over the years as to how they can support their customers. By bringing in a partner like us, we can provide the flow of information through all the partners in the supply chain.”
Behind the Ratings
The MindClick Sustainability Assessment Program (MSAP) was created through the Hospitality Sustainable Purchasing Consortium in collaboration with the USGBC, designers, purchasing agents, sustainability experts, and 20 FF&E vendors.
MSAP rates social and environmental impacts throughout the product life cycle. MindClick assigns a score out of a possible 200 points based on 9 key metrics.
Certifications and eco-labels provide the proof points. MSAP consolidates the results through ratings, making it easy to compare products and performance and buy better.