Decarbonizing healthcare. Improving patient outcomes.
We help healthcare systems and life science companies reduce emissions by redesigning how care is delivered. Our work is grounded in evidence, focused on impact, and driven by the belief that what’s good for the planet can also be good for patients.
The industry is ready. Here is what that looks like.
Pharmaceutical companies operate with one of the highest standards of quality, evidence, and regulatory discipline of any industry. That same rigour, and the same sensitivity to reputational risk, that once made sustainability change feel slow is now driving it forward with real conviction.
The top global pharma companies have set their sustainability ambitions. Strategies are in place. What we see in our work is an industry that has moved decisively from ambition-setting to execution. The question is no longer whether. It is how: how to make it work in the factory, in the clinical trial, along the care pathway, without compromising the delivery of medicines to patients.
That is the work we do.
Why care pathways matter
Treating late-stage kidney disease generates roughly 200 times the emissions of early oral therapy. Redesigning care pathways catches disease earlier, cuts waste, and decarbonizes at scale (SMI Decarbonising Patient Care Pathways).
Care pathways are the backbone of patient treatment. From prevention and diagnosis to treatment and long-term management, every step affects both health outcomes and environmental impact.
By analysing and redesigning care pathways, we identify where better outcomes and lower emissions can go hand in hand: whether through earlier intervention, smarter resource use, or shifting care closer to where patients are.
Who we work with
Our typical clients are among the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies.
They partner with us to:
- Understand the emissions embedded in care pathways
- Align sustainability and access-to-treatment strategies
- Equip medical, market access, and sustainability teams to act on decarbonization opportunities
- Bridge clinical, economic, and environmental outcomes
We also support hospital systems and public health stakeholders in translating global insights into local action.
What we do
We offer tailored consulting, strategic facilitation, and data-driven analysis to support care pathway decarbonization.
Our work spans:
- Pathway mapping and emissions hotspot identification
- Scenario analysis and intervention modelling
- Stakeholder engagement across clinical, policy, and procurement functions
- Tool and framework development to scale low-carbon solutions
We adapt global best practices to national contexts: always with clinical quality and system sustainability in mind.
How we engage
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic. Before we scope anything, we invest four to six weeks in structured interviews, data review, and benchmarking. The output is a precise picture of where your sustainability commitments meet operational reality, and where the gap is largest.
From that foundation, two paths.
Strategic programme
For organisations building a multi-year sustainability effort. We stay in as the strategic partner: translating commitments into operations, aligning teams across functions, and keeping the work on track as priorities shift. The relationship deepens over time.
Targeted sprint
For organisations with a defined, bounded problem. A care pathway hotspot analysis. A clinical trial emissions model. A supplier engagement framework. Fixed scope, fixed timeline, concrete output you can take into the next budget cycle.
What we keep hearing
After 100+ conversations with sustainability leaders across pharma, medtech, and hospital systems, a few patterns have become hard to ignore.
The era of the sustainability champion is ending
Every organisation we speak with has had one: the person who kept the sustainability agenda alive through sheer conviction. The most advanced organisations are now building systems that do not depend on any single person. The question is no longer who believes in it. It is how to make it structurally inevitable.
The evidence does not close the gap. Governance does.
Time and again: organisations with strong data, clear business cases, and visible leadership commitment, where implementation still stalls. The bottleneck is almost never the evidence. It is the governance structure, the decision rights, and the incentives that determine whether a sustainability initiative survives contact with the budget cycle.
The question has shifted
The world’s top pharmaceutical companies have set their targets. What we are now seeing from the inside is that the industry’s question has moved from “should we act?” to “how do we act without disrupting patient supply, clinical operations, or regulatory standing?” That is a harder question. It is also a more interesting one.
The Sustainable Healthcare Podcast
Over 100 episodes with leaders in pharma sustainability, hospital decarbonization, circular medtech, and healthcare innovation. Hosted by Joachim Almdal and Frederik van Deurs.
Cases
From strategy to operations across 20+ factories
A global medtech manufacturer needed their sustainability ambitions to land in manufacturing, not just in the annual report.
The situation
Corporate had set ambitious 2030 targets. The factories, spread across Asia, the Americas and Europe, were running on different systems, with different local KPIs, and no shared language for what sustainability progress actually meant at site level. The gap between the strategy deck and the shop floor was real and growing.
What changed
We worked with the central sustainability team and plant managers across all sites to build a shared framework: common KPIs, a consistent reporting structure, and a governance model that gave site leads the authority to act without waiting for corporate sign-off. A professional in Asia can now compare their factory’s progress with a colleague in the Americas or Europe, using the same definitions and the same baseline.
The result
Sustainability stopped being a reporting exercise and became an operational discipline. The corporate team gained a real-time view of progress across the portfolio. The sites gained clarity on what they were being asked to do, and the authority to do it.