Win Tenders With Sustainability (Joachim Almdal, Care Pathway Consulting)

[outro music] So what I take with me from, from what you just said is like, number one is, uh, prevented surgery is a b- is the best, the best surgery.

So preventative, uh, beats, um, inter- intervention or, or, uh, treatment overall.

So you should either go for something that prevents, uh, you should go for prevention first before you go for anything else.

Because i- if you can prevent or stop a disease or stop it from propagating or do two surgeries in one, then you can definitely save a lot of CO2.

Uh, so like I've, I've seen also a lot of, um, materials enabling this.

For example, like when I was, uh, nine, I broke my leg and I had a titanium implant, and the specific titanium implant, if you're nine, you're growing very rapidly, so you'll have to get the, the implant out.

Like with an adult, you will probably leave the plate in because it doesn't really bother them.

But if you're growing, you can't leave a titanium implant in.

If you do something like a PLA or a magnesium plant, they are bioresorb- resorbable, so over a, a period of six to, uh, three to six months, they will resolve or dissolve in your body and be bioresorbed Which means you, you can save, you can save a surgery with that, and you don't have to cut open your leg again and then have crutches and all the diagnosis and all the, like, care that is associated with that.

So that is what I take in.

And then secondly, like, you can also unlock a lot of value, which brings us a little bit to the, like, the second focus of, of what we want to achieve today.

You work a lot, and you've taught me this, uh, with commercial leaders in- instead of R&D or, or sustainability professionals.

So wh- why is that, and where do they see really the value in, in what you're doing with this care pathway, let's say, conceptualization of, uh, healthcare?

So just, uh, o- one quick caveat.

The, the counterpoint to prevention is always better is, is over-diagnosing and, and over-treatment that there, there are certain types of very general health screenings or, or other things which have been proven to, uh, actually not be worth, uh, the while, but, but that, that's a side note.

Uh, it's a great question about the commercial part, and, um, I think the short answer is that until sustainability really becomes commercial, uh, and really integrated into MedTech and pharma, we are never gonna get the impact that we need.

Then you do cool projects because you think they're nice and because you have wonderful, uh, people inside of organizations who do it out of the good of their heart.

We call them heroes, um, as opposed to a systematic or commercial approach.

But you just in, in any...

I mean, a large MedTech or pharma company, uh, at the end of the day, it's the ethos, the logic, all the governance structures are set up to treat patients and make money from treating patients.

So, so all your sustainability work has to be able to answer that.

And it's interesting.

So we see a very big gap between how good MedTech and pharma companies have become at reporting at the headquarter level to how good they are actually at, uh, integrating sustainability out at the national and regional, uh, sales offices or, or affiliates.

Um, luckily, what we're really seeing now, especially on MedTech in, in Europe, so it's very segment that so, so, uh, in, uh, uh, US there are, there are relatively f- few requirements.

But in, in Europe, almost all the, at least, uh, often Western, but also South, Southern Europe, actually Spain, France, uh, most of the healthcare systems there have set quite ambitious, uh, CO2 targets for, for reduction.