Practice Greenhealth has released version 1.0 of its Standardized Environmental Questions for Medical Products, which can be used to guide procurement of environmentally preferable medical products.
The tool, which can be downloaded here, is intended to serve as a template with a common set of standardized questions on key environmentally preferable attributes of medical products. The questions can be used by all stakeholders, including group purchasing organizations and health care purchasers in their supply chain procurement process and manufacturers and suppliers in their entire product life cycle process, Practice Greenhealth says.
Questions were selected with input from organizations representing various sectors of the health care industry, including hospitals, health systems and suppliers, GPOs, nonprofit organizations and government agencies, according to Practice Greenhealth.
GPOs initially endorsing the product include Amerinet Inc., HealthTrust Purchasing Group, MedAssets Inc., Novation LLC, and Premier Inc.
The program is part of Practice Greenhealth’s Greening the Supply Chain initiative launched earlier this year, which the group says the initiative should provoke a sector-wide market shift towards environmentally sound procurement.