Health Care Sustainability Metrics: Building A Safer, Low-Carbon Health System

As understanding grows of the scale of health care's environmental impacts, so too does interest in measuring and reporting on sustainability as a facet of health care system performance. This article examines important lessons from health care's long experience with performance and quality measurement and reporting that can be applied to the creation of health care sustainability metrics. Although some large health systems such as Kaiser Permanente have invested heavily in environmental stewardship, in the US the focus of health care sustainability measurement and reporting has typically been on corporate social responsibility and climate risk disclosure. The ability of health care organizations to generate data on and control environmental impacts can be limited by legacy infrastructure and complex supply chains. However, just as in other domains of performance, health care sustainability measurement and reporting must proceed from a clear conceptual framework and statement of purpose. Measurement must reflect strategic goals, instead of letting goals become dictated by ease of measurement. Health system leaders now need to set clear and compelling sustainability goals, invest in internationally comparable metrics by which to measure their success, and embed them in their core business.