Integrating Pediatric Anesthesia Sustainability Metrics into Native Electronic Health Records: A Clinical Informatics Approach.

The growing emphasis on sustainability in healthcare has highlighted anesthetic gases as notable contrib utors to the sector's greenhouse gas emissions. While adult anesthesia practices have increasingly adopted mitigation strategies, such as using lower fresh gas flows and total intravenous anesthesia, pediatric anesthesia poses distinct challenges due to the unique physiological and pharmacological requirements of neonates, infants, and children. The use of third-party applications for accessing anesthesia medical record data is costly. This technical report describes the development and implementation of pediatric-specific anesthesia sustainability metrics and integrating these metrics in native electronic health record systems for real-time data capture and feedback. Using a nominal consensus group process, 24 pediatric-focused metrics were identified across key perioperative phases. Subsequent integration into Epic's Anesthesia module facilitated automated data collection and the creation of interactive dashboards, which offer both department-wide and individualized provider feedback. Our report describes the feasibility of designing novel pediatric-specific sustainability metrics that can be used within the electronic medical record to benchmark environmental goals in pediatric anesthesia practice.