15%
of the carbon emissions of a hospital can be reduced using digital tools
Foreword
Every hospital today faces significant challenges: to meet increasing and complex healthcare needs whilst achieving fiscal objectives. And now there is another urgent objective: the fight against climate change.
The healthcare sector faces particular complications. Unlike other industries, where products and services can be substituted with lower-carbon alternatives, in healthcare such adjustments are not always possible. Yet significant reductions in carbon emissions are essential to meet government targets and ambitions for a net-zero future.
The challenge for hospitals is how to decarbonize while also delivering on key priorities including improvements to care, patient experience and efficiency. This is where digital technologies can make a major contribution to accelerate decarbonization.
Informed by our own world-leading decarbonization journey, Atos is enabling organizations to digitalize, transform and transition to net-zero. We can help you to integrate your digital and decarbonization strategies to meet your critical care priorities and financial objectives.
Reducing your hospital’s carbon footprint
For any hospital, the carbon footprint is made up of the energy you purchase and consume, the logistics you use, your buildings and facilities, your hardware and IT infrastructure, the services you deliver and the activities of your supply chain. These emissions are broken down into 3 different scopes (WHO – World Health Organization):
Scope 1
Direct emissions from your organization’s controlled resources
Scope 2
Indirect emissions from the energy you buy
Scope 3
All other indirect emissions that occur in your hospital’s value stream, both upwards and downwards
Energy consumption continues to be a major expense, accounting for over 50% of emissions across the healthcare value chain. With the supply chain making up 71% of all emissions, complexities are involved in reducing emissions that are not under your organization’s direct control. For hospitals, there are now key opportunities to address these challenges and meet sustainability and cost targets by decarbonizing your IT and decarbonizing your operations.
Vision
We help hospitals define an ambitious, realistic, and meaningful sustainability vision. We base this on input from the hospital’s key stakeholders, but also on external reports and benchmarks. One of the results of this exercise is clarity on the type of capabilities that the hospital needs to generate. Perhaps the main characteristic of this vision is that it is scalable, so that specific workstreams and activities can be easily derived from it.
For example, one healthcare organization recognized that as healthcare transforms to a more digital way of working, scaling digital technologies sustainably is vital. Atos was engaged to conduct a Digital Decarbonization Assessment to produce a breakdown of the organization’s digital emissions and, most importantly, a roadmap on where emission reductions can be made, including over 50 recommendations that will accelerate the organization’s journey to net-zero.
Operations
We aim to take advantage of all the benefits and opportunities of digital technology to determine the ‘critical paths’, whether on the patient journey, the clinical journey or the non-medical journey. It is on these that we generate a use case and recommend an appropriate digital lever to move from a ‘critical path’ to a ‘sustainable’ one. The advantage of this method is that in most cases these digital levers also have a positive business case in terms of operating expenses (OpEx) or generation of new revenue streams.
Benefits
You will have a clear sustainability vision, fully integrated with that of the entire hospital and contributing to the hospital’s objectives. Your hospital will have a catalogue of activities, a prioritized roadmap, and the potential impact in terms of both sustainability and business. And in terms of transformation, your hospital will have clear proposals for the roll-out of possible digital levers and strategies to help staff embrace change.
Related resources
Podcast
Listen to how net-zero initiatives are crucial for the Healthcare & Life Sciences industry and how they can help align your organization with the regulations and the changing investor and customer preferences.
Article
Read how decarbonizing your digital with technology and careful planning can reduce your carbon footprint and help possibly avoid the next healthcare crisis.
Report
The Digital Future of Healthcare – technology has now advanced to a level where healthcare organizations can do things smarter and faster than ever before. The benefits are considerable, as are the challenges, but digital transformation is not the only answer.