From regulatory push to market pull: the missing link in green healthcare

The global healthcare sector is faced with a paradox. The sector is tasked with creating healthier societies, while at the same time being a major contributor to the climate crisis(1), accounting for roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If healthcare were a nation, it would rank as the fifth-largest emitter on the planet.

In response to increased environmental concerns governments have implemented regulations to drive responsibility for packaging, waste and transparent reporting along the value chain. But here lies a systemic blocker: Compliance does not buy green products. Market demand does.

Market pull requires a systems-thinking approach

To ensure that we build resource-efficient health care systems, we need to look holistically at the environmental, financial and societal impact that solutions and services have. We must step outside the silo of corporate isolation and apply systems thinking. Companies are inherently designed to innovate, solve complex challenges, and meet customer demands. If public healthcare systems want to unlock this competitive, problem-solving engine, they should transition from a fragmented regulatory push to a value-driven market pull.

True sustainability in healthcare cannot be achieved by looking at carbon footprints in a vacuum. The ultimate goal of sustainable medical technology is to deliver the best patient outcomes in the most resource-efficient way possible across all three dimensions:

• Environmental Resources: Reducing Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, maximising material circularity, using water and energy efficiently and minimising toxic waste streams.
• Financial Resources: Operating within tight, taxpayer-funded public budgets where cost-effectiveness cannot be compromised.
• Societal Resources: Maintaining or improving patient outcomes, protecting clinical safety, and supporting an already overburdened healthcare workforce.

When a medical technology company designs a low-carbon, circular medical device, it isn’t just saving carbon. It is often reducing systemic waste, optimising hospital workflows, and safeguarding the local community’s health. Yet, the current commercial landscape fails to reward this holistic value creation.

The Procurement failure: fragmented and price-focused

In Europe, where healthcare is largely publicly funded, governments possess the ultimate tool for system-wide change: Public Procurement. By embedding impact-focused Green Public Procurement (GPP) criteria into tenders, public health authorities could shift the entire market toward the most resource-efficient solutions.

Instead, the application of these criteria is scattered, inconsistent, and not impact-focused. Recent data (2) from the European landscape reveals that more than half of all public healthcare contracts still rely entirely on the lowest price as the final award criterion.

When green criteria are introduced, they are a patchwork of voluntary, fragmented, localised metrics. One regional hospital system demands specific circularity data; another across the border requires entirely different material disclosures. For a globalised industry like medical technology, this fragmentation makes the business case for green innovation difficult to scale. If the market signal is weak and price remains the ultimate deciding factor, the system actively disincentivises companies from investing R&D capital into sustainable design.

Aligning the wallet with the mission

If we want the medical technology sector to unleash its innovation and engineering capacity, we must look to the principles of Value-Based Procurement (VBP), where the purchasing power of public healthcare is aligned with overall environmental and societal goals.

We are seeing early, proofs-of-concept that show what happens when the demand signal is unified:

• UK’s National Health Service (NHS) mandates 10% social value and net-zero commitment across all its procurements, this signals a demand for low-carbon supply chains to maintain market access.
• The ongoing reform of the EU Public Procurement Directives poses another opportunity as well as the Circular Economy Act. The goal should be to move past fragmented, voluntary measures and establish a single, predictable market for technologies that enable measurable efficiency (material, resource) gains and reduced emissions.

Conclusion: let companies do what they do best

Corporate responsibility is not about fulfilling reporting obligations or hitting top-down reduction mandates per se. True responsibility is a systemic collaboration where governments set clear, predictable, and harmonised parameters of value, and companies compete to deliver them.

Medical technology companies do not fear complex challenges; they are hardwired to innovate around them. If public healthcare systems stop buying based on the short-sighted metric of the lowest upfront price, and start purchasing based on the lowest total impact – financially, socially, and environmentally – the market will deliver.