Last year, an initiative of 350 hospitals under the Healthy Hospitals Initiative (HHI) recycled more than 50 million pounds of materials, diverted 61.5 million pounds of construction and demolition waste from landfills, and saved almost $32 million from single-use medical device reprocessing. HHI estimates that the 2,000 hospitals it hopes to eventually enroll can save billions.
Recycling, regulated medical waste reduction, energy management, and single-use device reprocessing were the four HHI Challenge areas with highest participation levels and represented the areas with the fastest financial rewards.
Gary Cohen, the founder of the HHI described, “If you aren’t doing those things you just aren’t operating an efficient business in healthcare. On the waste side, there’s almost no capital expenditure at all, it’s just process change, [toward] recycling and waste segregation, so that waste goes down, so that doesn’t spend any money. That’s just attention, it’s just a matter of learning from others. Reprocessing saves lots of money.”
Single-use device reprocessing had the highest data-sharing rate of all the HHI Challenges, which indicates how important it is to align business partners and supply chain professionals in order to track data and monitor performance.
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