Seattle Children’s committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2025. But how could they make that commitment a reality?
For years, leaders in anesthesia and surgery had been curious about the impact of their anesthetic practices on the environment. However, they lacked any practical way to measure, let alone manage, emissions across treatments, workflows, and providers.
With AdaptX, built on AWS, clinicians leveraged their EMR data not only to assess the climate impact of their anesthetics but also to evaluate the efficacy of alternate approaches. Now, both leaders and frontline clinicians could rapidly improve and manage care.
Using AdaptX's Mission Control Center™, a team of anesthesiologists, CRNAs, and surgeons led by Seattle Children’s anesthesiologist Elizabeth Hansen, MD, PhD, examined CO2 emissions for anesthetics administered in their ORs. Then, they demonstrated that shifting away from traditional, climate impacting gases would not adversely affect the quality or efficiency of patient care - including pain, post-op nausea, safety, or PACU length of stay.
At the same time, clinical leaders used AdaptX to identify and address variations in practice across physicians. By providing each clinician with direct Mission Control access to their own real-world data, leaders could quickly enlist dozens of anesthesiologists, CRNAs, and surgeons in their emissions reduction programs.
Each week, the clinical team used AdaptX to evaluate their carbon emissions, adapt their interventions, and monitor the impact of changes. Because AdaptX is self-serve for clinicians, they could evaluate new ideas and share their progress on-the-fly, dramatically accelerating their management cycles.
This immediate feedback drove broad engagement across the anesthesiologists, CRNAs, and surgeons.
Over four months, the clinical team delivered and iterated a series of continuously improving interventions to reduce carbon emissions. With AdaptX, the clinicians managed emissions by surgical specialty, by OR, and by procedure. They also monitored emissions by provider, offering coaching for clinicians who were slower to modify their techniques.
Results were dramatic: anesthetic emissions plummeted by 87% - reducing the health system's overall emissions by 7% and cutting costs by $175,000 annually.
Following the success at Seattle Children's, Dr. Hansen launched two multi-institutional quality improvement initiatives with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% in each participating center within 12 months. These initiatives are Project SPRUCE Forest for pediatric hospitals and Project Evergreen Forest for adult hospitals and anesthesia groups. Recruitment is currently in progress for both consortiums.
To learn more about the environmental impact of anesthesia and how Seattle Children's used real-world data to reduce anesthesia-related climate emissions, register for the webinar.