Philips, Jackson Health System announces results of collaborative LCA

Royal Philips and Jackson Health System announced results of a collaborative Life Cycle Assessment measuring the sustainability impact of transitioning to Philips next generation monitoring solutions. The study was conducted at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Jackson North Medical Center and Jackson South Medical Center in Miami-Dade County in Florida. The Philips patient monitors, deployed as an Enterprise Monitoring as a Service business model, can help reduce carbon emissions by 685.1 tons of CO2e or 47% compared to previous systems. This significant reduction also eliminates the need for an estimated 420,000 disposable AA batteries and 6.5 million sheets of paper, which can allow the health system to save $1.2 million over a 10-year device lifetime. These findings suggest that patient monitoring can become part of an overall carbon reduction strategy for health systems. Data from the LCA indicates that the Philips IntelliVue and EarlyVue monitors can help reduce the health system’s patient monitoring carbon footprint by 508 tons of CO2e across all facets of the lifecycle. Battery and paper savings reduce CO2e by an additional 177.1 tons. Before upgrading to Philips, all of Jackson’s legacy telemetry patient monitors were powered by disposable AA batteries, requiring hundreds of replacements each week. With the previous monitors, clinicians printed paper wavestrips multiple times a day per patient and then manually scanned them into their electronic medical record. In contrast, Philips telemetry monitors can run on rechargeable batteries, and provide a digital, automated wavestrip workflow, eliminating paper waste and freeing clinicians to spend more time with patients.