Hospitals, health groups use purchasing power to push for greener medical products
October 13, 2011
In the News
By Lena H. Sun
The Washigton Post
Hospitals and health systems are organizing the industry’s vast purchasing power to push manufacturers of medical products to make them with safer chemicals and to be more environmentally friendly.
Five large groups that buy $130 billion of these products every year on behalf of hospitals and other health-care facilities have adopted a standard set of questions they want vendors to answer. Those questions, which will be released Thursday at an industry conference, are designed to encourage manufacturers to produce “greener and safer products for workers, patients and the environment,” said Gina Pugliese, vice president of the Premier health-care alliance, which has a division that does group purchasing.
