Reducing Our Carbon Footprint

In setting up this practice we made conscious choices to minimize our environmental impact -- our "carbon footprint."

• We have committed to electronic medical record and electronic business office management systems. The intent is to decrease paper consumption as well as maintain an organized, portable medical record. A patient's chart can be saved to a CD that can be read on any computer. This saves paper and shipping resources.
• Our fax server collects and distributes the many thousands of pages of incoming faxes without ever printing to paper unless we specifically want a printed page.
• We are constructing our web site to include patient information and instructions that will decrease, but not eliminate, the need to distribute paper handouts.
• We have chosen to establish our office within walking distance from Fairbanks Memorial Hospital so that it will not be necessary for us to drive to and from the hospital for rounds and surgeries.
• We have chosen a carpet that is constructed of 25% recycled content. It is also designed to be deconstructed and the materials reused to make the same product again and again (cradle to cradle design). The flooring adhesives and wall paints that we chose contain no volatile organic compounds.
• For our medical office remodel, we chose to have previous structure refurbished rather than replaced where possible.
• For the digital/computerized medical equipment that we purchased new, we were mindful of energy consumption.
• For hard goods and fixtures such as operating lights, motorized procedure table, stools etc we chose to have Dan Anderson, BEST Biomed, refurbish pre-owned equipment bringing it up to new or better than new specs. This saved tremendous manufacturing resources as well as eliminating the need to ship thousands of pounds.

At Denali Surgical will continue to assess our "carbon footprint" and strive to make appropriate changes. Please contact us if you have any suggestions.