Why informaticians are key to advancing environmental sustainability in healthcare

Presentation Type: Level Up Session
Presentation Time: 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM

Working Group: Climate, Health and Informatics Working Group

Have you ever thought about what role(s) informaticians can play in helping advance environmental sustainability in healthcare? Healthcare contributes roughly 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, creating an urgent moral, clinical, and operational imperative to reduce its environmental footprint. Informaticians are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation because sustainability challenges - whether in energy use, supply chains, pharmaceuticals, anesthetic gases, transportation, or clinical workflows - are fundamentally data, informatics, and systems problems. Informaticians bring expertise in measurement, interoperability, workflow design, and analytics that health systems need to accurately account for emissions; build integrated dashboards; improve data quality; and connect clinical, environmental, and operational datasets. For informaticians, sustainability is not only a societal imperative but a career accelerator: Health systems need leaders who can translate sustainability goals into actionable data strategies, meet reporting requirements, and drive organization-wide change.

Speaker(s):
Titus Schleyer, DMD, MBA, PhD
Regenstrief Institute

Author(s):
Titus Schleyer, DMD, MBA, PhD - Regenstrief Institute;

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