Environmental impacts of healthcare services: Delivery of x-ray services

THE healthcare sector of the U.S rose to compromise about 18% of the nation´s GDP in 2010. In meeting patient needs healthcare organizations spend nearly $8.8 billion each year on energy. To achieve energy reduction, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) created a comprehensive initiative, Energy Smart Hospitals. Through this initiative the DOE attempts to define strategies and provide hospitals with resources and tools to identify costs and energy savings for their new and existing facilities. The Healthier Hospital Initiative (HHI) is a program that is committed to improve sustainability across the healthcare sector. One of HHI´s goals is the reduction of healthcare´s use of natural resources and generation of wastes. The majority of work has focused on facility level energy reduction targeting HVAC and lighting. The work presented in this poster takes a different approach. In this presentation we report on an analysis of the energy consumed during the delivery of diagnostic X-ray services, also referred to as Interventional Radiography (IR). It is a part of a larger body of work to catalogue environmental impact information for a number of healthcare services and to relate those data to medical outcomes. The setting for this study is the Radiology Department of the Robert J. Dole Veteran´s Administration (VA) Hospital, a general medical care and surgical hospital, located in Wichita, Kansas.