Energy consumption of VA hospital CT scans

Abstract

The United States healthcare spending was about $7,681 per resident and accounted for 16.2% of the nation's GDP in 2008 and rose to compromise about 18% of the nation's GDP by 2010. As healthcare sector continues to grow so will its consumption of nonrenewable resources such as energy. Most of the attention in documenting and reducing energy consumption in healthcare has focused on the healthcare facility heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting systems. In this paper we take a different approach in order to gain a more detailed understanding of energy consumption leading to environmental impact information of healthcare services. This paper reports on the preliminary analysis of the energy consumed for Computed Tomography (CT) diagnostic service delivered. It is a part of a larger body of work to catalogue environmental impact information for a number of healthcare services and to relate those data to medical outcomes.