A recent trend report showed hospital executives are still holding strong to sustainability-related commitments regardless of federal changes. University of California, Irvine (UCI) Health is embodying that with its new all-electric hospital, set to open Dec. 10.
UCI Health says the new hospital is the first all-electric acute care hospital of its size in the country, featuring renewable solar park structures, electric instead of gas for utilities like heating and hot water systems (which also extends to water used in sterilization and humidification), and even all-electric appliances in its kitchen, Joe Brothman, UCI Health’s director of facilities and general services, who has overseen portions of this new project, told Healthcare Brew.
And electricity isn’t the only sustainable feature at the 350,000-square-foot, 144-bed hospital, Brothman said.
The hospital also has rainwater collection built into its landscaping that uses recycled water, bird-friendly glass, around 87% outdoor water reduction and about 38.5% indoor water reduction, and energy efficient equipment for lighting along with other building components.
“It’s a significant cost to make this all-electric [hospital], but we do anticipate, in the long run, that we will have a cost savings, especially with the rising costs of natural gas,” Brothman said.
Community benefit
A big impetus behind this project has been reducing healthcare’s impact on the community, Brothman said.
“Hospitals, typically, are significant burdens on the local community with their output, both with carbon emissions and with waste,” Brothman said. “This hospital is going to be different.”
A 2023 study analyzing how health systems impact the environment concluded their global greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to that of 514 coal power plants.
On top of that, Brothman noted, California is particularly keen on environmental initiatives, especially as the state often bears the brunt of climate change-driven wildfires.
“We wanted every aspect of sustainability. Our priorities here at UCI Health is to model environmental stewardship, and we wanted this [hospital] to be an example of that in all aspects,” Tony Dover, energy management and sustainability officer at UCI Health, told us.
University of California, Irvine Health
According to Madhura Dhayagude—assistant VP with engineering consultancy WSP and an energy and sustainability consultant on the UCI project—the project beat expectations and stretched goals.
Engineers aim to meet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers’s 90.1 standards, which is an industry guideline for measuring energy use, and the new hospital saw a 43.7% reduction over that number, she said. Further, the builders set out to achieve a minimum 160 energy use intensity (EUI), which measures how energy efficient a building is (a lower number means it’s more energy efficient), and achieved 110 EUI when including the solar panels atop its parking garage.
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The hospital is also on its way to a platinum LEED certification, a tiered sustainability certification, which would make it the sixth hospital in the country to receive this designation (the highest possible), she added.
Narrowing the scope
Ultimately, having an all-electric hospital is a solid step in sustainability goals, but if execs aren’t looking to Scope 3 supply chain emissions, then it’s not making as significant of a difference, Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari business professor at Johns Hopkins University, told us.
“[Hospitals] may be switching to all-electric operations, but if their suppliers, if their vendors are still creating a lot of emissions, it probably will not matter as much as is advertised,” he said.
According to 2020 data published in Health Affairs, about 82% of emissions were Scope 3, which are those that come from indirect sources like manufacturers and suppliers. Comparatively, only around 7% make up the Scope 1 emissions that come directly from hospital operations.
To take things to the next level, Dai added, hospitals should look at emissions created by utility suppliers, transportation deliveries, where drugs are made, where medical devices come from, software and hardware vendors, and whether they’re using data centers for AI.
Dover said UCI tracks and reports Scope 3 emissions for employees’ commutes, business travel, and waste. Some vendors and suppliers the health system contracts with “prioritize sustainability,” he added, and UCI Health is “collaborating with [suppliers] to identify opportunities to reduce emissions,” such as by reducing packaging waste and cutting transportation-related carbon emissions.
Though, Dai said, moving things around with manufacturers could ultimately hurt a hospital’s bottom line and shift too much of the focus away from its main priority—which is, of course, serving patients.
“A lot of things are really completely outside [a hospital’s] control. Most hospitals have no clue about the sources of supplies,” he said. “If we do not have that kind of transparency, it’s very difficult for us to make any informed decision. But that’s precisely what most hospitals, most health systems, are facing.”