Predicting the Climate Impact of Healthcare Facilities Using Gradient Boosting Machines.

Journal: Cleaner environmental systems
Published Date: Nov 26, 2023

Abstract

Health care accounts for 9-10% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. Strategies for monitoring these emissions at the hospital level are needed to decarbonize the sector. However, data collection to estimate emissions is challenging, especially for smaller hospitals. We explored the potential of gradient boosting machines (GBM) to impute missing data on resource consumption in the 2020 survey of a consortium of 283 hospitals participating in Practice Greenhealth. GBM imputed missing values for selected variables in order to predict electricity use and beef consumption (R=0.82) and anesthetic gas desflurane use (R=0.51), using administrative data readily available for most hospitals. After imputing missing consumption data, estimated GHG emissions associated with these three examples totaled over 3 million metric tons of CO equivalent emissions (MTCOe). Specifically, electricity consumption had the largest total carbon footprint (2.4 MTCOe), followed by beef (0.6 million MTCOe) and desflurane consumption (0.03 million MTCOe) across the 283 hospitals. The approach should be applicable to other sources of hospital GHGs in order to estimate total emissions of individual hospitals and to refine survey questions to help develop better intervention strategies.

Authors

  • Hao Yin
    CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Marine Bio-resources and Ecology, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.
  • Bhavna Sharma
    School of Architecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, 90089.
  • Howard Hu
    Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, 90033.
  • Fei Liu
    Department of Interventional Radiology, Qinghai Red Cross Hospital, Xining, Qinghai, China.
  • Mehak Kaur
    Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, 90033.
  • Gary Cohen
    Health Care Without Harm, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 20190.
  • Rob McConnell
    Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, 90033.
  • Sandrah P Eckel
    Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, 90033.

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