Knut Siercks Executive Vice President - Global Innovation Management – CTO KARL STORZ SE & Co. KG
Key Highlights:
Adopting best practices in surgical procedures can help healthcare providers to serve their patients better, driving shorter hospital stays and an enhanced post-surgical quality of life
New technology is rapidly improving the effectiveness and number of applications for driving the efficacy of minimally invasive treatments
Innovation, patient preferences, and more economic solutions are tilting the balance in favor of sustainable outpatient settings
Due to their ecological impact, and because of their CO2 footprint, raw materials have the largest impact on sustainability
Excess capacity leads to inefficient use of resources. For instance, expensive medical imaging devices may spend much of their lifecycle in the standby mode
New compliance and regulatory frameworks can provide a significant opportunity for sustainable innovation and revenue generation
Empirical data, driven by suitable models, is one of the most powerful tools for understanding various healthcare functions, predicting vulnerability and assessing options for mitigation and adaptation
Measuring sustainability involves leveraging vital indicators, including
conformity
use of material and performance
effect and impact
Supply chain and product lifecycle
Reducing your ecological footprint can start by reducing the packaging materials you use
Think globally, act locally has never been more critical to the healthcare to create innovative solutions
Need to calculate the ecological footprint with respect to national income
Building sustainable medical devices starts at the very beginning, at the design phase. This is where 80% of sustainability decisions are made
The potential pathways to improved device sustainability and questions for manufacturers to consider in the design phase are - material selection, device design, manufacturing process, durability, packaging
