Nowadays, it is hard to go a day without hearing about sustainability, the environment, and the climate crisis.
But it wasn’t always that way—and we didn’t always have ways to track the environmental impacts of different sectors, much less tackle them.
“In the field of health care, sustainability was a hidden priority,” said alum Mellissa Nguyen MAITP/MBA ’09, senior program manager of environmental sustainability at Vizient, the largest healthcare process improvement organization in the U.S. “Health care’s main focus was on keeping hospitals open and delivering patient care.”
However, the U.S. healthcare sector has a huge impact on the environment. The industry produces roughly 1.7 million tons of plastic waste every year. If the U.S. healthcare industry were its own country, it would be the seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
“It’s more than the emissions from furnaces and ambulances,” Nguyen said. “It’s the products and services used to deliver patient care, which includes personal protective equipment, anesthetic gases, food, surgical tools, electronics, lab equipment, paint on the walls. Everything has an environmental impact, which, in turn, has an impact on the health of the community.”
Today, Nguyen is uniquely positioned to help health care shift toward more sustainable practices. Vizient represents $140 billion in healthcare supply chain and pharmaceutical purchasing power. The company offers strategic planning and consulting services to help improve how hospitals operate and saw that hospitals wanted to identify products and services with reduced impact on human and environmental health, but needed help.
Nguyen’s role was developed in 2016 to work with hospitals and suppliers to increase their environmentally preferred purchasing. Because Vizient represents more than 60 percent of the U.S. healthcare market, when their clients make changes, it has a huge impact.
Nguyen emphasizes that being more sustainable is also better for patients.
For instance, about 25 percent of all medical waste is made of plastics. Plastics contain chemicals—some of which can leach out and be absorbed by the patient and the care providers.
“Health care’s bioethical oath is to ‘do no harm.’ Yet, we are inadvertently harming our patients and caregivers by not reducing the amount of waste, chemical exposure, and impact on the climate with the products used in health care every day,” Nguyen said. “When I stepped into this role, I got the opportunity to combine all of my past experiences to help make health care healthier, starting with defining what sustainability means in health care.”
When I first started, it felt like I was the only person who really cared. But throughout my career, I discovered that a lot of people care. They might not be using my vocabulary or saying it the exact way I wanted to hear it, but people do care and are willing to help if you are willing to find common ground and collaborate with them.
These past experiences included an early fascination with products, packaging, and the supply chain as a young helper at her parents’ grocery store. As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen remembered being intensely curious about the journey overseas goods took to reach the shelf.
This global thinking led to service in the Peace Corps, where Nguyen saw firsthand how the tiny, isolated South Pacific nation of Vanuatu struggled to cope with waste and climate change. After Peace Corps, Nguyen enrolled at the Middlebury Institute to study international trade.
“There was still so much to learn and unravel about how to elevate the voices of lesser-developed economies on a global scale,” Nguyen said.
At the Institute, Nguyen was exposed to several opportunities that would influence her career. She assisted with a greenhouse gas inventory for the area Monterey Bay governments in partnership with AMBAG and ICLEI USA. Nguyen also secured an internship with the International Trade Administration in the Department of Commerce, learning about chemical categorization and health impacts for the first time.
“When I first started learning about hormone-disrupting chemicals that are in many regular products that we use every day, it really upset me,” she said. “At the time, there was a lack of consolidated information on how these chemicals are monitored. This internship really ignited a passion inside of me. I returned to the Institute that next semester and added on a dual MBA degree focused on corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. I wanted to be part of the solution to remove these toxic chemicals from products.”
Nguyen’s work continues to focus on reducing chemicals of concern. In 2022, she participated in the Sustainable Production in the Health Sector global forum with the UN Development Programme, focusing on healthcare purchasing for a toxic-free future. She also represented the private healthcare sector in a multi-stakeholder consultation for the Inter-Organization Programme for the Sound Management of Chemicals (IOMC). The IOMC played a key role in the development and implementation of the Global Framework on Chemicals, a comprehensive international agreement to set targets for chemical and waste pollution reduction by 2030.
While Nguyen works in the private sector directly with U.S.-based hospitals, she has collaborated with several international governmental organizations—including the UN Environment Programme, World Health Organization, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—in addition to various global Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations such as Healthcare Without Harm.
Sustainability in health care has come a long way, but there is always plenty more to do.
“For instance, if a hospital needs to buy an MRI machine and wants to evaluate sustainability, it’s hard to get clear information. The sector doesn’t yet have consistent criteria for many purchases like these,” said Nguyen.
In October 2024, Nguyen was invited to present on a four-year collaborative to develop sustainability criteria for biomedical imaging devices at WHO’s Expert Consultation on Climate Resilient and Environmentally Sustainable Supply Chains in the Health Sector.
“We all have a role to play for the betterment of the health of our communities,” she said. “It’s really easy to get overwhelmed, but we all need to come to the table together to start tackling these complex issues one by one.”
During her trailblazing career, Nguyen often had to “trust the process” to discover where her passions would lead. Today, she has a unique perspective on the evolution of sustainability in health care.
“When I first started, it felt like I was the only person who really cared,” she said. “But throughout my career, I discovered that a lot of people care. They might not be using my vocabulary or saying it the exact way I wanted to hear it, but people do care and are willing to help if you are willing to find common ground and collaborate with them.”
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