Can't Manage What You Don't Measure?

The Global Health and Safety Initiative (GHSI) and others is working on a very complicated system to accurately measure all pertinent inputs and outputs to the ecological footprint of an entire healthcare system:

“There are many different models and calculators out there, but they tend to only look at pieces of what a full footprint would be, like energy or CO2 carbon emissions,” says GHSI Executive Director Bob Eisenman, PhD. “What we are ultimately interested in is tracking most of the ways that hospitals and healthcare impact the environment. So eventually we are trying to pull together energy, carbon, toxic gas emissions, waste stream issues, water, transportation, and more. But we haven’t seen a tool like that yet, particularly with toxic and hazardous materials, which healthcare uses often.”