Outpatient Surgery Magazine
November 20, 2012
Daniel Cook
If hospitals nationwide worked to reduce their energy use, waste and surgical supply inefficiencies, total healthcare savings would total $15 billion over the next decade, according to collaborative research supported by the Healthier Hospitals Initiative and Health Care Without Harm.
Operating rooms are large consumers of energy and waste management resources and account for 33% of all hospital supply costs, say the researchers. In their study, hospitals that sent single-use devices out for certified reprocessing and bought them back at a fraction of the price of new saved $12 per procedure, not including the resulting waste disposal savings. Extrapolated over 5 years and across all hospitals in the United States, those per-case savings would total $2.7 billion, according to the study…