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Editor’s note: This excerpt is from a story previously published in The Minute, created by the MarkeTech Group, a global marketing consulting firm that supports the MedTech sector with customer research. 

In the article, Megan Maltenfort, VP of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) at Cardinal Health, participates in a question-and-answer session about the importance of ESG strategies, and how Cardinal Health and customers around the globe are ramping up sustainability efforts.

You can view the full interview here.

Q: What are the most important sustainability concerns that healthcare customers currently have?

A: Some of the more important concerns that we hear from healthcare customers include chemicals of concern, improving product durability and reprocessing, product take-back and recyclability, and packaging sustainability, including whether packaging contains recycled content and can be recycled.

There are a growing number of conversations about life cycle assessments and understanding the carbon footprint of medical products.

We also see broader concerns about data: Healthcare facilities want more data from us about greenhouse gas emissions and how we can help them advance their own climate goals, particularly for their supply chain. They want to understand what our corporate goals are and how we can work together to advance shared goals.

Q: What specific sustainability features or practices do you see becoming increasingly important to healthcare customers and how will it impact their buying process for medical devices?

A: I believe that practices like reducing plastics, reducing chemicals of concern, improving the sustainability of packaging, including cold chain packaging, and improving the durability or reuse of medical products will become more important to healthcare customers. Cardinal Health's Sustainable Technologies™ is a medical device reprocessing business with a growing portfolio of products. We believe that reprocessing will be increasingly important to healthcare customers moving forward, as it helps reduce costs for customers and helps to drive sustainability goals, so it is a real win-win.

Q: How do you see the sustainability landscape evolving in the medical technology industry, both in terms of company practices and customer demands?

A: As health systems become more mature in setting and tracking sustainability goals, they will be much more reliant on suppliers for specific data about product or supply chain footprints: They will expect us to support their goals. I think that by providing such data to our customers, we'll see purchasing teams begin to consider the total value proposition of a product and/or service offering. There is a clear ask for more environmentally preferable products in the industry, but there is little appetite yet to pay more for them. By taking a holistic approach and looking at the total value proposition of what a supplier can offer (in terms of reprocessing, waste reduction, or cost savings), we hope that the healthcare institutions will go beyond the unit price of a medical product. This will help the industry to develop and sell these more environmentally preferable products.

I think that collaboration within the industry will continue to deepen to improve data tracking and data integrity and will help us to identify efficiency opportunities to reduce carbon and waste. One company cannot do this alone; I'm excited for closer collaborations among MedTech manufacturers, distributors, and hospital systems.

Click here to read the rest of Maltenfort’s interview.