Partnering to advance sustainable healthcare

When it comes to supporting the health of our planet, we know that collaboration is essential to make progress at the scale. That’s why we partner with businesses, NGOs, academic organizations and others to accelerate our own progress and support a more sustainable and resilient healthcare sector. Some examples include:

Through an ongoing collaboration with Americares and The Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE), we are supporting community healthcare workers and communities that could experience the impacts of health inequities exacerbated by a changing climate.

The Climate Health Equity for Community Clinics Program aims to bolster climate resilience in free and charitable clinics and community health centers across the United States. The first focus of the work is the impact of extreme heat and wildfire smoke on patient health. Participating clinics access an online tool to create their own customized action plans with targeted interventions to help keep patients safe.

Through the Digital Health in a Circular Economy (DiCE) collaborative, we are partnering with 20 other organizations to address the increasing challenge of digital heath waste. Together, we are looking at every point in the lifecycle of digital health devices to identify opportunities to extend the use or responsibly dispose of these products. DiCE receives co-funding through the European Union’s Horizon Europe program.

Johnson & Johnson helped develop and launch an open access tool for estimating the greenhouse gas emissions of clinical trials. The tool, which is intended for clinical research organizations, can calculate the emissions of different activities associated with design, management and operations in order to identify opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint of clinical research. This cross-industry solution was built in collaboration with the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, several peer companies and academic research institutions.

Additional partnerships and collaborations to support a more sustainable healthcare sector include:

• Collaborative for Healthcare Action to Reduce MedTech Emissions (CHARME)
• ENKORE¹
• Healthcare Plastics Recycling Coalition
• National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Health Sector
• Pharmaceutical Life-Cycle Assessment Consortium
• PHARMECO¹
• Prioritisation and Risk Evaluation of Medicines in the Environment (PREMIER)¹
• Renewable Thermal Collaborative
• Sustainable Healthcare Coalition
• WWF Climate Business Network

¹ Program led by Innovative Health Initiative, an EU public-private partnership funding health research and innovation in Europe.