A healthcare institution is to a large extent a real estate business with a care function on top. Hospitals, nursing homes, mental health locations and GP posts each have their own energy connection, their own climate installation and often their own manager. Where an office organisation deals with one or a few buildings, a healthcare organisation sometimes counts dozens of locations, spread across multiple municipalities, each with a different age, a different insulation level and a different energy contract. The ratio between what is recorded centrally and what is managed locally per location is therefore structurally different from a sector with a single business location. That makes adding up energy and water consumption an exercise that starts with finding out which locations actually exist, before even looking at a number.
Most basic data on energy, water and waste runs through the facility service or property management, and that department often works with a different system than the financial administration. Energy invoices sometimes arrive directly from the supplier, sometimes through a facility management package, sometimes through an external party that manages the real estate on behalf of the institution. At larger healthcare groups, real estate is regularly housed in a separate foundation or BV, which means that the sustainability figures of the healthcare real estate are not automatically in the same administration as the care figures. Anyone who wants to compile consumption per location must therefore first know whether this runs through their own facility service, through an external property manager, or through a mix of both per location type.
Healthcare buildings have an energy profile that differs from a regular office: sterilisation equipment, imaging technology, air handling with strict hygiene requirements and 24-hour lighting on nursing wards draw power continuously. That consumption is not always measured separately; at many locations it simply runs through the building's main meter. For anyone who wants to understand which part of the energy consumption relates to medical functions and which part to office functions, submetering is often not available. That means the first question is not how much energy a building consumes, but whether a breakdown exists, and if not, which assumptions are needed to arrive at a breakdown anyway.
Healthcare institutions with home care, ambulance transport or district nursing have a mobility component that can be spread across the administration of staff cars, lease cars and own transport. Mileage allowance claims run through HR or payroll administration, lease contracts through a separate lease manager, and the organisation's own vehicle fleet, such as service vehicles for material transport between locations, through facility management. At larger home care organisations, the number of kilometres driven per employee is relevant to the CO2 footprint, but that data is generally recorded for reimbursement purposes, not for sustainability reporting. The result is that part of the transport data does exist, but in a form and in a place that is not set up to be added together.
Healthcare institutions with their own kitchens, laundries or sterilisation departments have waste and consumption streams that do not occur in every sector. Medical waste is collected separately and disposed of by specialised processors, with their own reports that are separate from the regular waste contract. Laundry services are sometimes outsourced to an external laundry, meaning that water consumption and chemical use from washing cannot be found in the institution's own meter figures, but in the supplier's invoices and reports. Anyone who wants to include these streams must therefore look outside their own systems, at contracts and reports from external service providers that sometimes deliver quarterly and sometimes annually.
The chain of medical devices, from disposable material to equipment, runs through a purchasing department that works primarily with quality and delivery requirements, not with environmental data. Suppliers of medical products provide varying levels of insight into the origin and environmental impact of their products, and that information is rarely structured in the healthcare institution's own purchasing system. For anyone who wants to map the chain emissions of purchased care products, the first job is therefore to inventory which suppliers do and which do not make environmental data available, before an estimate of the missing part can be made.
This breakdown into real estate, medical installations, transport, support services and purchasing is a starting point for seeing where a healthcare institution's sustainability data originates and who has access to it. The same way of thinking, applied to a different sector, brings different bottlenecks to light: in wholesale it revolves around storage locations and transport flows, in manufacturing around production processes and material use, and in education around real estate that is set up much like healthcare but without the medical component. The overview of where data originates is a necessary step, but it does not yet say anything about who manages the figures, in what format they are and whether they can be linked to a verifiable source. That is the work of the Data Readiness Scan: a data point register with lineage per data point, from source system to reporting line, including ownership and quality rules. The scan is under development; anyone interested can sign up for the waiting list.
Once it is known where the data is and who is responsible for it, another question follows: how much of the collecting, checking and entering can be taken over by a system, and how much still requires human oversight. FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, an outcome that connects to this inventory as soon as the data points and their owners are in view.
Vraag maar waar een datapunt vandaan komt. Dat is meestal de hele vraag.
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