Cardinal Health today published its Fiscal 2025 Sustainable Business Report, which showcases how our sustainable business practices support our business strategy. “This work is key to Cardinal Health’s mission of improving the lives of people every day,” said Megan Maltenfort, Cardinal Health’s vice president of sustainable business. “Sustainable business practices are enhancing our ability to best serve our customers and patients, and are advancing our vision of becoming healthcare’s most trusted partner.”
The report is organized around three pillars: Strong culture, resilient business, and healthy patients and communities. “Throughout, readers will find a focus on business and supply chain resiliency, mental health support for our employees and communities, and access to quality healthcare,” Maltenfort said.
Highlights of the new report, which details work during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, include:
Strong culture
- We listen to and support our employees, from our Voice of the Employee (VOE) listening strategy to a variety of leadership development programs and gigs. Our fiscal 2025 VOE showed that:
- 95% of employees know how their work contributes to our goals and objectives,
- 93% believe strongly in Cardinal Health’s goals and objectives and
- 87% find personal accomplishment in their work and say they would recommend the organization as a good place to work.
- We continue to support the mental health of all employees and work to create a stigma-free culture. In fiscal 2025, we rolled out a mental health training, required for all bonus- eligible employees, which provides guidance on recognizing the signs of mental health distress and responding appropriately.
- Through a Safety Improvement Plan focused on leadership, engagement and risk reduction, we reduced our total recordable incident rate (TRIR, a standard safety metric used to measure the frequency of workplace injuries and illnesses in our operations) to 1.04, from 1.23 the prior year.
Resilient business
- We unveiled the highly-automated, LEED Silver-certified Consumer Health Logistics Center in Central Ohio, a centralized replenishment center for an expanded mix of Cardinal Health and national brand products to help our pharmacy customers enhance their front-of-store.
- We opened a tech-enabled at-Home Solutions distribution center in Fort Worth, Texas, which ships an average of 10,000 packages a day to patients' homes across the country.
- We’ve reduced Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 17% since fiscal 2019 toward our science-based target of 50% reduction by 2030.
- We invested $2 million to deploy 28 energy efficiency projects across our portfolio. These projects are expected to deliver $964,000 in annual cost savings, and reduce GHG emissions by more than 4,500 metric tons CO2e.
Healthy patients and communities
- Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions (NPHS) is now producing at scale the therapeutic isotope actinium-225. Ac-225 is in high demand, seen as a promising new treatment in the fight against cancer.
- In our Global Medical Products and Distribution (GMPD) segment, we continued to embed our product and packaging sustainability framework into our research and design processes. We offer a variety of products that reduce waste and/or reduce product carbon footprint, including our new Kangaroo OMNI™ Feeding Sets, our Monoject™ SharpStar™ Renewable Sharps Containers and reprocessed devices through our Sustainable Technologies business.
- We are helping customers increase access to quality care and medications, through at-Home Solutions’ enablement of hospital care at home and Sonexus™ Access and Patient Support, which provided $5.5 billion in manufacturer-donated specialty medications to patients last year.
- Our Foundation’s signature initiative, Equity Rx, has filled about 28,000 prescriptions at no cost for patients in need. Equity Rx also is enabling the development of Ohio's first statewide prescription drug repository and distribution center, where donated medications will be sorted, inventoried, catalogued and prepared for distribution at no cost to charitable healthcare organizations and pharmacies across the state.
You can view the full report here.
Editor’s note: Cardinal Health's new Sustainable Business Report was prepared using three foundational reporting frameworks: the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for comprehensive sustainability reporting, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) for industry-specific disclosures, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) for climate-related risk disclosures.
