Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2023 - 29

IMPROVEMENT / FEATURE
ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT
EMISSIONS DOWN, SAVINGS UP
IN JUNE 2022, CEO Jeff
Sperring, M.D., announced
Seattle Children's would reduce
the organization's emissions by
50% by 2030. Multiple teams are
now actively engaged to meet
that goal. Assistant professor
of anesthesiology, Elizabeth
Hansen, M.D., led a team in
the OR focused on reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by
7% in their department.
Hansen developed a metric
using routinely collected data:
tapping gas flows from the
anesthesia machines in the
operating room to calculate the
carbon footprint per minute
of every anesthetic given. This
data was stratified down to
the clinician level and provided
clinicians with daily, weekly
and monthly feedback. Outliers
who were outperforming were
identified and their techniques
and workflows served as
examples for the rest of the
group. This coupled with an
educational campaign to
implement simple and safe
modifications to established
workflows and team-approved
practice constraints reduced
OR emissions by 10 times in the
last year, representing 500,000
kg of CO2. In addition to saving
the planet from harm, this also
saves the hospital $140,000 in
anesthesia gasses per year.
In 2021, Hansen launched
Project SPRUCE (Saving
the Planet by Reducing
Unnecessary Emissions)
Forest, and Seattle Children's
is now leading an international
consortium of peer hospitals
to scale this work across the
country and around the world.
BY THE NUMBERS
10x
reduction in
greenhouse
emissions
$140,000
saved in anesthesia
gasses
500,000
fewer kilograms
of CO2
The bottom line
Through these case studies, Seattle Children's has demonstrated
what is possible today when data, captured by EMR systems, is
democratized and available to every hospital leader and provider.
To enable this work, the hosptial created an Enterprise Data
Warehouse (EDW) to store and organize the data, and made
it available to all clinicians via a self-service adaptive clinical
management solution.
Like DePodesta and the Oakland Athletics, hospital teams are
empowered to use that data to create value for their patients
and their institutions by measuring and managing what matters
across facilities, providers, workflows and patients. They can find
the outperforming outliers, previously hidden in their midst, learn
from them, and scale their practices. In doing so, they transform
how quickly they can adapt and improve their systems to increase
efficiency, capacity, clinical effectiveness and equity.
Lynn Martin, M.D., MBA, is medical director, Bellevue Surgery
Center; Kayla Reece, M.S.N., RN, CNOR, is former director,
Ambulatory Surgery Centers, Perioperative Services; and Daniel
Low is an anesthesiologist, Seattle Children's, and CMO, AdaptX.
Send questions or comments to magazine@childrenshospitals.org.
CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS TODAY Spring 2023
29
Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2023
