GE HealthCare says this cost-saving sustainability initiative is a hit with hospitals

“When you do well on sustainability, it does help your bottom line,” said GE HealthCare Monitoring Solutions CTO Oliver Astley.

GE HealthCare‘s patient monitoring business is leaning into a new way to cut product packaging and installation costs while also reducing environmental impacts and offering several benefits for customers.

That’s according to GE HealthCare Monitoring Solutions Chief Technology Officer Oliver Astley and GE HealthCare Monitoring Solutions VP Manny Santana, who recently discussed the initiative in a Medical Design & Outsourcing webinar.

“GE HealthCare is extremely committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050,” Astley said. “… You have to have the culture, plus you have to operationalize that within what you do day to day. That means we are implementing environmentally conscious design into the products that we build from the time we kick off a design all the way through until it hits product.”

On that webinar — which is now available for free on-demand replay — we discussed sustainable product design and initiatives at GE HealthCare, challenges they’re trying to solve for hospitals and other customers, and building a culture where ideas can come from anyone across the organization, just like this one did.

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“One of the things that came out of our teams was looking at how we do packaging,” Astley said. “Our patient monitor is not so different, at least from a form factor, from a television. You buy a television from your electronics store, and it comes in a box, and that box has packaging in it and things to keep it from breaking while in transit. We looked at that as, well, we build our product in factories, and it goes to different distribution sites all over the world. Our engineers and some of the people who are literally working with that packaging every day said, ‘This is crazy, all this packaging.'”

Their idea, he said, was to start using reusable transit carts with reusable packaging to move the products from one place to another as they’re built, shipped and stored.

The initiative reduced packaging volume by 53% and packaging weight by 48%, Astley said, while reducing plastic and cardboard waste by an estimated 22,000 pounds.

“It’s awesome from a sustainability perspective, but frankly, it also saved us money,” Astley continued. “When you do well on sustainability, it does help your bottom line, too. It seems quite rare that the two are not in sync, which has been a real good lesson to learn for us.”

GE HealthCare took the concept beyond the factory and warehouses, Santana said, with a customer-facing program the company calls Install Carts.

“It’s really simple,” Santana said. “In the past, we boxed up 1,500 pounds of cardboard boxes to ship 100 monitors out to a customer. Now, we package them in reusable containers, do all of the configuration at the factory, put the accessories and mounts on, basically the monitor’s ready to bust right out of that box and be put it on the wall for the customer.”

GE HealthCare is expanding the program to meet customer demand, Santana said.

“This has been a huge customer delighter for a lot of different reasons,” he said. “They have ESG initiatives to reduce waste and reduce cardboard — we’re not bringing any in, so that helps. We’re saving them a ton of space in their loading docks as we bring these massive projects to bear at a hospital. And we’re way more efficient getting them up and running when we’re doing a big monitoring conversion. Then for us, like Oliver said, there’s a huge advantage from a cost perspective, a productivity perspective. It’s really incredible. It’s win, win, win, from every angle. The customer is winning. We’re winning. The supply chain is winning. It’s been super exciting to see, and there’s a huge environmental impact alongside it.”

Watch the free webinar replay for more sustainability advice from Astley and Santana, including how other medtech developers can find, vet and work with suppliers and other external partners on cost-saving sustainability projects like this one.