Medical waste — more than 5.4 tons per year for an average operating room — costs each operating room about $5,243, according to the 2015 Practice Greenhealth Sustainability Benchmark Report. A partnership between Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon, which manufacturers surgical devices and Intermountain Healthcare is tackling this issue, reducing waste and operating room expenses, through a circular systems approach. In 2015 this approach saved the health care company about $250,000 on medical devices, or 22 percent on total spending of $1.1 million. It also diverted 59,964 pounds of waste from landfills, avoiding 35,978.4 pounds of CO2 emissions.
Single-use medical devices, such as ultrasound catheters, surgical drills and laparoscopy scissors, are designed to be used only once and then tossed. This creates a huge amount of medical waste — and can be expensive for hospitals to replace new single-use items. Intermountain, a Salt Lake City-based health care system with 22 hospitals and 185 clinics, already recycled materials and had been doing this for several years. But simply recycling wasn’t helping the health care company meet its environmental or business goals, says Steve Bergstrom, Intermountain director of sustainability. “We needed to reduce consumption and the only way to accomplish that was through a circular approach,” he said in an interview with Environmental Leader.
After discussing this concept at CleanMed, a health care industry environmental conference, Intermountain and Ethicon teamed up to improve medical device collection and reprocess devices. The partnership works like this: Intermountain collects used medical devices. It returns them to Ethicon, which sends them to Sterilmed, also a Johnson & Johnson company, for reprocessing. Sterilmed turns the old devices into new ones and then Intermountain buys back a mix of reprocessed and OEM devices from Ethicon. “It required an interdepartmental effort on both sides to make this work,” Tim Lessek, senior marketing manager of Ethicon, told Environmental Leader.
To read the full story, visit http://www.environmentalleader.com/2016/05/18/how-reprocessing-medical-devices-can-save-millions-while-diverting-waste/.