by Nick Jacobs

As I look down the barrel of my last 17 working days as CEO at Windber Medical Center, three very important goals remain unfinished (but I am aggressively moving toward completing all three). The first is to achieve designation as a model patient-centered care Planetree hospital.

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Windber was the first Planetree Hospital in Pennsylvania; we have been working at creating optimal healing environments for nearly a dozen years, and now we are working to qualify to become a designated Planetree hospital. As a healthcare consulting specialist, spreading the Planetree and Optimal Healing Environment gospel will be my passion.

The second goal is to become a completely digital hospital. With a recent multi-million dollar leasing arrangement and the installation of a new Meditech computer platform, we will soon be able to claim digital completeness as a special General Electric strategic partner.

Our final goal is to become green. Currently the hospital is now a beta site for numerous companies eager to contribute to the greening of the hospital industry. Our goal is to emerge with a model that can be replicated and then recreated internationally as many of the biggest polluting organizations in the country, our hospitals, begin to get their carbon act together.

Unfortunately, with higher interest rates, increasing charity care, declining admissions, difficult credit, and overall lower access to capital, hospitals across the country will be facing a complicated challenge moving forward. The good news is that going green can be economically beneficial as well.

This blog is too short to detail all aspects of a hospital going green, but the big tasks include: lighting retrofitting, demand response monitoring and metering, power quality analysis, building automation and eventually our own biomass/co-generation facility. Financial benefits will include: significant net savings each year on power consumption; the ability to sell not only energy, but also more financially lucrative green energy back to the power grid; financial remuneration from selling the aggregated credits on the carbon credit market, and the knowledge that our kids and grandchildren might actually have a fighting chance at surviving global warming.

As a healthcare consultant, it will be my goal to put together this entire package so that my peers will be able to begin to assimilate this list of items into their facilities quickly and painlessly. In our case, it appears that we will be able to lower our annual energy expenses by approximately one third, and those savings should allow us to purchase micro turbines that will effectively take us off the grid and allow us to sell electricity back to the Power Company.

You've got to love it when a plan comes together.