Lauren Koch - What Healthcare Can Teach Us About Sustainability at Scale

[00:00:10] Dominique: Hello and welcome to Green Champions.

[00:00:12] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

[00:00:16] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Dominique.

[00:00:24] Adam: And I'm Adam.

[00:00:25] Dominique: Today we're really, really excited. We are joined by Lauren Koch. She currently serves as the sustainability Senior Program Manager at Mars Veterinary Health.

I've had the privilege of working with Lauren in her role as Sustainability program manager at Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center. Prior to that, Lauren has had a lot of interesting roles, but she also earned two Master's degrees. I'm looking forward to hearing more about what led her to such impactful roles.

And today we're talking about sustainability as it relates to healthcare. So, thanks for joining us today, Lauren.

[00:00:52] Lauren: Thank you. Thanks for having me. And nice to meet you, Adam 'cause we haven't met before.

[00:00:57] Adam: I'm really excited.

[00:00:58] Lauren: Excited to be here.

[00:00:59] Dominique: Well, I kind of wanna start all the way back with your master's degrees, which is why I mentioned that. What were your interests in college and was it sustainability?

[00:01:08] Lauren: Did sustainability exist then? And the answer is no. You might have just been born, I don't know. 

[00:01:17] Dominique: Okay.

[00:01:17] Lauren: I did my undergrad at Ohio State from 2001 to 2005, so I'm dating myself. But yeah, that just was not a topic. Certainly not in business 'cause that's where I did my undergrad.

And the honest answer is I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I picked business because that's general enough to do a bunch of different things. And then I got a really cool opportunity to move to Virginia Beach and work in this emerging leaders program for GEICO, right outta college. And that made me figure out what I wanted to do with my life. 'Cause I was working 60, 70 hours a week managing a call center essentially. And I was like, is this what full-time working is because I am not into this. And it took me a while, it took me a couple years, but around that same time, I finally saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and I can like still remember it. This moment, I was sitting on a couch. I was in my apartment in Virginia Beach and thinking I have to do something, but how do you do anything? I wasn't a climate scientist. I didn't know what to do next. But that planted a seed that just stuck with me, and I slowly made my way back to Ohio.

That's when I worked at the medical center the first time. They have this great program where you can get graduate school essentially for free. It was like 90% off. And so I started in a program at John Glenn, and then I figured out I wanna add something on related to environment and natural resources.

And that's when I found out about the School of Environment and Natural Resources and this ability to do this joint Master's program. And so it was there that just, I started learning more about this topic and this issue. I remember talking to my advisor and he suggested I go back to the business school and talk to someone named Neil Drobny. Many people who listen to this podcast will, will know of him. He is the person who really created this now is a undergraduate program, but at the time was for grad school students in business thinking about sustainability in business. And that was the 'aha.' Okay, here we go.

Now I'm finally, I can take my background, I can take my skillset and I can figure out how to move that towards the rest of my career. And so then I spent the next couple years finishing up my graduate degree. Met Aparna Dial, who still works at Ohio State, and she helped me with my master's project. And we looked at lead buildings and the energy performance of a lead building as it was designed versus actual results. Found some like really interesting research and that just led to this, I guess, piece that I have carried since then, which is, how do you tie data and sustainability together in a business context?

[00:04:09] Dominique: I'm curious to ask about your emerging leader program with GEICO. well, you kind of buzzed over it, but you were like, that's what I started figuring out, what I wanted to do. What do they do with you there? 

[00:04:17] Lauren: Well, the idea at the time, I don't even know if they still have this, but the idea was how do we bring students with potential into our business and have them learn the business and then become future leaders at our organization. And I was clearly a failure there because I left after a couple years. But I got to go and I got to see it. Like I shadowed the sales department, then I shadowed the service and the claims department. You do these projects. 

[00:04:44] Dominique: A lot of exposure. 

[00:04:45] Lauren: Yeah, just exposure to the business. A lot of businesses have these programs. And basically it helped me, I guess the thing that it helped me learn is I have to do something with impact. Like I have to be purpose driven. I can't be working 70 hours a week to make profit for some company. Like that just isn't fulfilling to me. So that was my lesson there. But yeah, that was the program 20 years ago.

[00:05:10] Adam: I love that. Well, and then I wanna jump back forward to, you know, this project analyzing the lead criteria before and after. But first can you describe what lead design is in architecture for somebody who doesn't know?

[00:05:22] Lauren: Yeah. And I'm gonna forget the acronym, Leadership and Environmental Excellence in Design. It's a certification program for buildings that they can get credits for different sustainability features. So it could be energy efficiency, it could be water efficiency, it could be renewable energy, it could be innovation credits. And they have different levels that you can work up to so it's essentially how do you design a building to be more sustainable? And the question we were asking during my grad school was, did it actually work? And we found some interesting results, which I think then, and we'll talk about this when I share the job I ended up getting, which was going back to Ohio State.

But the answer we found was you have to have some type of performance review. And that's really what was missing in those early days with lead. So you can design it, but if you don't go back and double check that everything is running exactly how you designed it, then you're gonna run into performance issues. We did a great paper, the other person who helped on that is Professor Victoria Chen, who is an engineer, I think still a professor of engineering there, and helped write a paper about this. So if you're interested, you can look it up and find out more.

[00:06:36] Adam: Hey, we'll have to link to that in the show notes. Now after you had gotten this degree, like how did you begin to actually weave that into your career?

[00:06:42] Lauren: Yeah, so because I was working at the medical center at the time, I started saying, how do I just weave this into my everyday job? I was an office manager in the Department of Pharmacy, and so I started researching who's already doing this. Learned that Cleveland Clinic had done a bunch of sustainability work across their healthcare institutions.

So talked to people there, found out about healthcare without harm and practice green health and started making suggestions, working on projects, and then eventually put together a proposal, which my then boss took to the CEO at the time of the medical center to say, Hey, we need to be focused on this.

And ideally you hire a person to do that. They were like, great paper and did not hire a person, but gave me a nice pat on the back. But it's okay 'cause it ended up being part of my application process then for when I applied to an opening at Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth. 

[00:07:43] Dominique: What do those two groups do? 

[00:07:45] Lauren: Yeah. So, essentially Health Care Without Harm is the global part of the organization. It's a NGO, a nonprofit that provides resources globally for healthcare on how to be more sustainable. Practice Greenhealth is its North American arm. So covering US and Canada, and they have a membership based model. So a healthcare institution like Ohio State Medical Center can belong to it, get resources of how to execute different sustainability initiatives across their hospital.

[00:08:14] Adam: You know, many of our listeners are often asking the question, Hey, how can I get into a role in sustainability or build my career around that? And it sounds like one, you went and had your master's degree in this, so you had some knowledge and then you're very intentional in your workplace of like, how can I weave this into the projects that I'm doing and actually come up with a proposal that you present. What advice would you give others who are kind of at a similar point in their career where they're like, Hey, how can I actually get into this field?

[00:08:39] Lauren: I mean, the advice I gave probably 10 years ago would be that sometimes you do need to go and get a graduate degree or some type of expertise. And for me, you know, I was a atypical graduate student. I was working full-time. I did not come in straight after undergrad. I was not doing my degree full-time, so I couldn't do an internship.

So the advice I would always give people is I volunteered to do Council of Graduate Students Sustainability Committee, or I wove it into my job like we just talked about. So it's finding creative ways to get the experience, whatever that is. Some people are gonna have the latitude to do grad school full-time and do an internship.

Others might not even be able to go to grad school. And so, I think it's then doing a little extra, you know, volunteering in your community. We talked earlier, before we started about Green Columbus. That was another thing that I did as I joined the board of Green Columbus and just helped with initiatives across Columbus. I also did, I wrote some grants for FLOW, Friends of the Lower Olentangy Watershed.

They do just great things to preserve the ecosystem, keep the water clean. So it's tree planting, it's river cleanups. 

[00:09:54] Dominique: also broadly, any community that has waterways nearby probably has a watershed group, And so that's local to that community of the Olentangy. if you were to see like a, like a heat map of watershed groups, you would see them around all the waterways. And they advocate for keeping that water clean and also like building programming and initiatives around our waterways.

[00:10:15] Lauren: Exactly.

[00:10:16] Adam: Now, did you have any experience in grant writing? Like what led you to say, I'm gonna some grants for this, you know, group? 

[00:10:22] Lauren: I had started to go down that path with my full-time job, I was like, oh, I could, I love writing. Grants are kind of like a fun structured way of doing it and you get money to do more things that you wanna do. So I had started doing that for my department. And I thought, Ooh, I could do this for environmental work.

So I thought, oh, that's a nice way to do it. Do it for free and see if something comes of it. And then, man, have I continued to use that skill ever since then.

[00:10:50] Adam: No, that's fantastic. And an interesting idea for somebody who's starting out to say, Hey, actually how can I use my skills to get more experience in the environment and help out a local organization? 

[00:11:00] Lauren: The other thing I would say just on the advice question is I asked for a lot of informational interviews, so I went to someone who had the job that I wanted and I was like, "How'd you do it?" And I have continued to do that throughout my career. And so then someone said this to me early on around this time, they're like, I will definitely meet with you. All I ask is that you pay it forward. And so I stole that shamelessly, and I say that now every time someone asks me. I'm like, I'll absolutely meet with you eventually when you're big and famous and a chief sustainability officer, or you just, all I ask is you pay it forward. So I think that's the thing that if people are trying to break into this space, you're lucky because everyone is so cool and nice and willing to share because we realize like the work that we do is only so important. We actually need everyone thinking about this in every single job. So the more people we can bring into this tent, the better.

[00:11:50] Adam: I love that. And I like that ethos of, of giving back, but also learning from each other of like, Hey, here's a path that worked and allowing people to share that. 

[00:11:59] Lauren: Yeah. I mean, mine is a weird, curvy, windy path

[00:12:02] Adam: Most are, which is really fascinating in the environmental space. It's not like, Hey, I grew up and I decided I wanted to be a doctor and I studied for eight years and now I'm a doctor. It's like, 

[00:12:11] Lauren: It is kind of cool though that now people can, they can go into undergrad and say, I wanna work in sustainability and build a career from there and start doing internships right away. Like that gives me so much hope. That's so awesome.

[00:12:24] Dominique: Which I think something I wanted to also get to is like, why you care about some of this stuff. And you clearly have been passionate about healthcare and sustainability in that intersection. Like I hear that through line in a lot of your experiences and it's awesome because it does feel like that's been very consistent for you. And you've learned other things along the way, which I really like and I relate to of like being curious and being like, oh, I wanna help with that. But why does that get you so motivated?

[00:12:49] Lauren: I just think like I had a light bulb went off after I watched that documentary. I was like, I have to do something about this. This is the issue that cuts through all other issues. If we can't fix climate change, this is gonna impact our health, but it's also gonna impact all the other issues that we're dealing with right now. It's gonna create more wars, it's gonna create more poverty. Like this is the issue that it all starts with. And so I think that's why it just feels like, I don't know, apocalyptic, like we have to address this verse. And if I can tell you secret, the health angle is total accident, like that's just because I was working at the medical center when I was getting my graduate degree. It was just based on where I was. And so I found this little niche and it's kind of small. It's getting bigger but that has really worked for me. And yeah, the more I learn about it, the more passionate I am about it. I mean, I think the climate and health topic is one of also the most important. And now working on climate and pets, right? Which is fun.

[00:13:54] Adam: I was just going to drill down into sustainability in healthcare because it does seem like on the surface there's a conflict between healthcare, prioritizing safety over sustainability. And so how do you approach that and like how do you come up against that when people are like, "Hey, no. We have other priorities."

[00:14:11] Lauren: Yeah, I mean, it's an ongoing challenge. There's no easy answer. More broadly, if we think about sustainability and healthcare, it's just like any other business. It's how do we take the lens of sustainability to everything that we do. And that can be moving back towards reusable items and we start with how we deliver the supplies, right? Like, let's not even touch the safety issues yet. Let's just talk about recycling the packaging. Let's talk about how we can compost in our break rooms. Let's talk about how we can use less energy to power all the equipment and that electricity that we purchase can it be green electricity, right?

Can we move towards renewables? So I think we start with what all of us in the industry talk about as the low hanging fruit, and that becomes the beginning of the conversation. Just like any other business, we're talking about cost savings because particularly in human healthcare, margins are really small.

It's not that different in animal healthcare and veterinary services. We have to be mindful of those costs. So anything where we can demonstrate there's a business case for doing it, that's what we're going after first. Your direct question about how do we handle the like safety versus sustainability conversation is all about relationship building.

It's about getting to know the people who are making those quality and safety decisions, helping them undersea this wider lens and scope of what's happening in our planet and what are the opportunities that we can take together that are gonna feel comfortable for them, that are low risk, you know, meets their risk tolerance profile, meets some sustainability criteria, and still maintain safety for the pet or the human, whatever we're talking about. So it's not easy, none of this work is.

And that will be an ongoing issue. But I think the more we can educate our quality and safety and risk professionals, I think the more we can find creative solutions together.

[00:16:12] Dominique: I feel like that feels very, honest and true to your experience it makes sense that like for a human forward solution. You have to have like a human-centric approach to it. 

[00:16:20] Lauren: That's well said. Yeah,

[00:16:22] Dominique: Well, that's what you said.

[00:16:23] Lauren: No, you summarized it better. 

[00:16:26] Dominique: you kind of hit on that a little bit of like the animals versus humans. What do you notice transitioning from a medical center environment to veterinary health? Do you talk about things differently? Like what's been learning curves?

[00:16:39] Lauren: It's the same. It is wild. I am working on the exact same projects that I was at Ohio State Medical Center as I am now. The only difference is that we have a clinic model that's so much smaller than acute healthcare. So Ohio State's, now when they open this new tower, it's gonna be 2 million square feet plus, it was 1.2 when I was there. Moving to distributed clinics that are maximum 30,000 square feet, sometimes only 5,000 square feet, like think about a Banfield and a PetSmart. These are really tiny spaces, so it's not the same strategies. It's the same work. We're still doing all the same things. It's different strategies to execute. So for example, whereas at Ohio State, we were working on recycling programs that were leveraging a reverse logistics distribution model to collect and aggregate all the material. We're doing mail back programs with our hospitals, our clinics in animal healthcare. So it's still the same work. We're still tackling the same things. It's just different ways of doing it because it's a different footprint.

[00:17:49] Dominique: Was that surprising for you or did you?

[00:17:51] Lauren: Shocking. It never even occurred to me that this would translate as well as it does. 

[00:17:57] Dominique: I just kinda, I think I thought there would be like, okay, I see commonalities. But I'm having to think about things differently. Even like stakeholders, you feel like stakeholders are very similar in terms of like the things you're looking for, the kinds of collaboration. You have to think about

[00:18:09] Lauren: Almost the same.

[00:18:11] Dominique: Wow, That's so cool. Okay. 

[00:18:13] Lauren: It's wild.

[00:18:15] Dominique: Do you think it was best to go from one to the other? Like in hindsight, do you think like going from that like very big, large square footage has changed your perspective to now this like clinic model, but it, there's so many clinics in so many communities? 

[00:18:28] Lauren: Well, I don't know if it's, I think it's more that I just needed to learn what I learned before this role. So, you know, we talked, we started to talk a little bit about after I graduated, then I ended up at Practice Greenhealth and Health Care Without Harm. I like to joke that I got my PhD there in healthcare sustainability because it was seven years that I spent there hopping around to different jobs, but really got to dive into a lot of different topics. And then I got to come back to Ohio State and work at the medical center implementing.

So whereas at Practice Greenhealth, I was pulling together toolkits and advising and supporting. Then I got to come and actually do the work, which you got to see some of the realities of that. And then I think that really both those experiences really prepared me for this role because it's almost like I'm setting up a mini Practice Greenhealth of figuring out how to talk to and get information to 3000 clinics globally, but we're also doing some implementation and making sure that the projects we're suggesting can really work. 

So, you've spoken a little bit about actually finding the projects that save money, the low hanging fruit, but it sounds like there's this other piece around communication. What does that work look like Well, how do you get to the like needles in the haystack right now. And that was a big thing that it was my first role at Practice Greenhealth. I was managing a campaign called the Healthier Hospitals Initiative. And it was a free campaign and initiative with resources. But our job was, I was an outreach specialist at the time.

Our job was to go and find people at hospitals that would be interested in signing up for this. And so, that takes a lot of creative work. It was partnering with hospital associations and figuring out how to get this information to their membership. It was getting articles placed in prominent places that they would be reading and learn about it.

It was going to conferences and trying to share that we had this free initiative that hospitals could sign up for. And that work, while it sounds so specific, all those strategies that we did, it's the same thing that I tried to do at Ohio State, right as we were working on the green team and trying to figure out where were their champions across the hospital.

Now same thing in this role, how do I find those really excited and passionate champions at those 3000 clinics? And that is all about various mediums of communication. Interestingly enough, what we talked about with you putting the podcast on videos, this is what I'm learning. It's like video, video, video. Don't send me a PDF, don't send me something I have to read. Oh, like, like training education wise, you mean?Or even just anything that we wanna share with them, they do not want, I mean, we're still sending newsletters and we're still sending written documents, but for the most part, people want it on their phones, like you said.

[00:21:20] Dominique: What's the biggest misconception you find yourself communicating?

[00:21:23] Lauren: Oh, recycling of course. Is this actually being recycled? This is the number one question at Ohio State and still continues to be the number one. 

[00:21:33] Dominique: Recycling will be the death of every sustainability professional.

[00:21:35] Lauren: We just did a webinar in November about this. I'm gonna do another one in May of like myth busting. How do we know that this is actually being recycled, showing them, kind of the audits that we're doing to ensure that this is happening and just sharing information about that 9% statistic, that's of all plastic, that's not of plastic sent through your curbside recycling program.

Like that's a much higher percentage that gets recycled. So that's the number one question every time.

[00:22:02] Dominique: Well, thank you so much for letting us hear your backstory and sharing advice with us. I'm just so glad we could have you hear your advice around like how to progress through your career, how you learn from other people, how you are so people-centric when you're problem solving, but also data-driven.

I am just grateful you've shared a bit of your wisdom with us and our listeners. How can people connect with you or be an advocate of the work that you're doing? 

[00:22:27] Lauren: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn and an advocate of the work that I'm doing. I guess I would push people to Green Columbus if you're in the Columbus area. That's such a great organization and a good one to stay connected with.

[00:22:44] Dominique: And are there any like websites or platforms where you share what's happening at Mars? Is there like in case someone wants to learn more about the veterinary health work? 

[00:22:52] Lauren: Well we have on our website. You're welcome to go to marsveterinaryhealth.com. And then we have a section called Veterinary Sustainability. So you can read our report that we released in January. And we'll continue to post updates there.

[00:23:06] Adam: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

[00:23:09] Lauren: Thank you.

[00:23:10] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:23:20] Dominique: You can find our episodes, donate or reach us at thegreenchampions.com. Give us a review and follow us in your favorite podcast platform. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions, we'll dig into the second half of Lauren's success story in our next episode.