How a Faith-Based Healthcare Organization Is Turning the Tide of Environmental Impact.

The healthcare sector's role in every community is inextricably linked to the health of those it serves. As research and media reports point to the significant impact of people on our planet's ecosystems, Ascension has responded by setting several environmental sustainability goals. Our work is defined by three pillars: Net Zero Places focuses on carbon sources associated with Ascension's physical environments-carbon footprint, operational efficiency of facilities, and sustainable transportation.Responsible Supply Chain focuses on the flow of goods from procurement to disposition-responsible purchasing, product usage management, recycling, and waste management.Healthy Communities focuses on the relationship between sustainability and social determinants of health (SDOH)-linking determinants to Ascension's mission to sustain and improve the health of those we serve, especially the poor and vulnerable. When we think about future generations, we realize that this work cannot wait. That is why we are reimagining today what environmental impact and sustainability could look like through the next decade and beyond. We are setting our corporate sights on net zero carbon and zero waste by 2040 and encourage other healthcare organizations to join us in these efforts. Working together, we can make a difference.

Computational medicine, present and the future: obstetrics and gynecology perspective.

Medicine is, in its essence, decision making under uncertainty; the decisions are made about tests to be performed and treatments to be administered. Traditionally, the uncertainty in decision making was handled using expertise collected by individual providers and, more recently, systematic appraisal of research in the form of evidence-based medicine. The traditional approach has been used successfully in medicine for a very long time. However, it has substantial limitations because of the complexity of the system of the human body and healthcare. The complex systems are a network of highly coupled components intensely interacting with each other. These interactions give those systems redundancy and thus robustness to failure and, at the same time, equifinality, that is, many different causative pathways leading to the same outcome. The equifinality of the complex systems of the human body and healthcare system demand the individualization of medical care, medicine, and medical decision making. Computational models excel in modeling complex systems and, consequently, enabling individualization of medical decision making and medicine. Computational models are theory- or knowledge-based models, data-driven models, or models that combine both approaches. Data are essential, although to a different degree, for computational models to successfully represent complex systems. The individualized decision making, made possible by the computational modeling of complex systems, has the potential to revolutionize the entire spectrum of medicine from individual patient care to policymaking. This approach allows applying tests and treatments to individuals who receive a net benefit from them, for whom benefits outweigh the risk, rather than treating all individuals in a population because, on average, the population benefits. Thus, the computational modeling-enabled individualization of medical decision making has the potential to both improve health outcomes and decrease the costs of healthcare.