Health Care Emissions Impact Calculator

Core Features

The Health Care Emissions Impact Calculator combines GHG Protocol-based accounting methodologies, healthcare-specific emissions factors, and spreadsheet reporting tools to help organizations understand their environmental impact.

• Scope 1 Emissions Calculation: Calculates direct emissions from stationary combustion, vehicle fleets, refrigerant leakage, and other relevant sources. The tool incorporates global warming potential values from the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), including updated refrigerant data.

• Scope 2 Energy Emissions Accounting: Estimates emissions associated with purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling. It supports market-based electricity accounting and incorporates geographically relevant electricity emissions factors, including US and Canadian regional data.

• Scope 3 Healthcare Supply Chain Assessment: Covers indirect emissions from purchased goods and services, capital goods, transportation, waste, business travel, employee commuting, and other value-chain activities. Users can apply expenditure-based calculations or activity-specific inputs such as weight and distance where supported.

• Healthcare-Specific Emissions Sources: Includes calculation options for regulated medical waste, hazardous pharmaceuticals, ambulance and airlift transportation, and other activities particularly relevant to healthcare operations.

• Facility and Health System Inventories: Provides separate workbook versions for individual healthcare facilities and multi-facility health systems. The system version consolidates information across facilities, with macros required for its multi-facility functionality.

Closing Insights

Introduced in 2023, the Health Care Emissions Impact Calculator forms part of Practice Greenhealth's broader efforts to help healthcare organizations measure and reduce their environmental impacts. Unlike cloud-based carbon accounting platforms, its spreadsheet format enables organizations to conduct assessments without purchasing software subscriptions.

Practice Greenhealth continues to update the calculator. Its June 2026 release revised electricity emissions factors, expanded refrigerant coverage, improved waste calculations, and corrected an upstream natural gas calculation error. These changes build on earlier improvements to Scope 3 data inputs and market-based electricity accounting.

The calculator is freely available following a short registration form. Users might want to review its methodologies and geographical assumptions before application outside North America.