Sustainability pillar

The sustainability pillar provides guidance on how to understand the environmental impact of cloud workloads, how to quantify impacts through the workload lifecycle, and how to apply design principles that help minimize these impacts.

Health expenditures account for approximately 10% of global economic output, and consequently, healthcare impacts the environment through emissions, pollutants, and water consumption. For example, the healthcare sector is estimated to generate between 7.9% and 9.8% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, it is important for healthcare organizations to take steps to minimize this impact. For example, the UK has included their national health services in their plans to meet Paris Agreement commitments on climate change mitigation. In the US, independent, forward-looking healthcare delivery systems are making investments to achieve carbon neutrality.

A central mission of healthcare is to improve population health, with consideration of the patient experience. The environmental impacts of healthcare have downstream impacts on the health and experience of communities, making considerations of sustainability aligned with that central mission. Underserved communities may be more susceptible to environmental impacts and climate change more broadly. Thus, the goals of decreasing health inequities and improving sustainability are linked.

Many organizations in the healthcare vertical operate on thin profit margins (or operate at a loss), which limits their capacity to make sustainability investments. Fortunately, the Well-Architected best practices for sustainability can also help to lower total cost of ownership for healthcare workloads. As presented below, organizations can decrease costs as they mitigate downstream environmental impacts, supporting better health across our communities.

The Well-Architected Sustainability pillar offers an improvement process to guide efforts to minimize unfavorable environmental impacts for all cloud workloads. For healthcare workloads, the following considerations and best practices should also be considered.