Greening the OR

Operating rooms can drive big facilities’ cost savings and efficiency improvements through smart, incremental, sustainable practices. Even more important, it’s possible to make these changes while not only maintaining quality patient care but also supporting staff and environmental health.

Though a tiny percentage of a hospital’s total physical footprint, operating rooms have a huge impact on hospital budgets. Operating rooms, on average:

• Drive up to 60% of a hospital’s revenue
• Are responsible for 40 to 60% of the organization’s total supply costs
• Produce more than 30% of a facility’s waste and two-thirds of its regulated medical waste
• Can consume three to six times more energy per square foot than anywhere else in the facility

Despite a sound business case, one of the greatest challenges for greening the operating room can be convincing the surgical teams, who rely on empirical data and consistencies in structure and process, to consider changes in their respective practices. Practice Greenhealth partner hospitals have learned that data, communication, and collaboration across disciplines is crucial to success, especially in the surgical setting.

Practice Greenhealth offers resources to help members develop proactive frameworks for undertaking Greening the OR strategies. Our goal is to provide step-by-step resources that make it simpler for any hospital to design, implement, and measure the success of efforts that reduce energy use, supply costs, and waste generated in the operating room.

The median health care facility with OR's saved over $45k in 2024 from all Greening the OR strategies, with large facilities reporting a median total savings of over $175k annually.