Change Healthcare Helps Measure and Reduce Carbon Emissions from the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is responsible for 10% of U.S. greenhouse gases; new collaboration helps providers and health systems become carbon neutral using data and AI.

Today Change Healthcare announced a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Zasti to help healthcare providers accurately measure and monitor greenhouse gas emissions based on actual care activity. This service uniquely identifies the carbon footprint of individual care decisions, provides peer benchmarks, and offers recommendations to reduce carbon emissions. This enables organizations to pinpoint sources of carbon emissions, inform decision-making, and track progress, all to help reduce emissions.

Care requirements and pathways impact an organization’s carbon footprint due to the types of supplies they require, such as PVC tubing or the anesthetic gases they emit such as desflurane, sevoflurane, and nitrous oxide. The Change Healthcare-Zasti collaboration enables providers to measure and benchmark their carbon footprint by leveraging artificial intelligence to analyze individual procedures and bills of materials. This data-driven approach is faster and more accurate than typical survey-only methods. And once a carbon baseline is established, peer benchmarking and progress tracking are automatic using ATOM, Zasti’s proprietary Healthcare Carbon Database, which is a major advantage in comparison to simply engaging a consultant.

“The power of our collaboration is combining real-world data that is already processed by Change Healthcare with Zasti’s ATOM platform,” said Tim Suther, senior vice president and general manager of Data Solutions at Change Healthcare. “A provider’s carbon baseline can be quickly established with visibility into how individual procedures and activities contribute to carbon emissions. The ATOM platform then provides benchmarks and actionable insights to reduce those emissions. Real-time data-driven actions can then help reduce carbon emissions.”

“Representatives from every sector of the global economy gathering at the COP26 summit in Glasgow seek the very solutions Zasti’s platform, ATOM, delivers to the healthcare industry,” said Krish R. Krishnan, CEO of Zasti.ai and a delegate to the Glasgow Climate Summit. “Our collaboration with Change Healthcare, combined with our technology, offers the first-ever AI-based Healthcare Carbon Database Service, a true game-changer as the healthcare sector embraces decarbonization strategies.”

Leading cataract surgeon Dr. David Chang has been evaluating the Change Healthcare-Zasti product at his Peninsula Eye Surgery Center in Northern California, noting that having a tool to measure and reduce carbon footprint is vital: “The carbon footprint of the healthcare sector in general, and the operating room in particular, is surprisingly large. We have an important opportunity to make an impact by being more green and by reducing needless OR waste.”

Climate change has been tied to more than $820 billion in health costs per year. The editors of more than 230 medical journals have indicated that climate change is the greatest threat to public health. Accordingly, healthcare organizations need actionable decarbonization strategies. Leveraging the Change Healthcare–Zasti collaboration, these organizations can (1) understand their unique carbon emissions; (2) compare themselves to peers and identify opportunities to lower emissions; and (3) automatically measure and report upon progress.

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About Change Healthcare

Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG) is a leading healthcare technology company, focused on insights, innovation, and accelerating the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system through the power of the Change Healthcare Platform. We provide data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial, administrative, and patient engagement outcomes in the U.S. healthcare system.

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