106 - Alejandra Medina from Quipment on Circular Clinical Trials

How do you cut 40% of the carbon out of a clinical trial without changing the price? You rent the equipment instead of buying it.

In this episode of the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast, part of our mini-series with the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition's Community of Practice for Clinical Trials, Frederik Dam van Deurs speaks with Alejandra Medina, Chief Sustainability Officer at Quipment, the French, B Corp-certified provider of equipment solutions for clinical trials.

About the guest: Alejandra Medina is Chief Sustainability Officer at Quipment SAS, a Nancy-based company founded in 2010 that equips and maintains clinical trial sites across 110+ countries. She joined as quality director and led Quipment through its B Corp certification.

Three things you'll take away:

• An equipment-rental ("equipment-as-a-service") model is circular by design: returning, reprocessing and redeploying devices keeps them in near-constant use across the value chain.
• - Quipment's benchmark, built for B Corp certification, shows a 40% carbon-footprint reduction moving from a linear to a circular model, comparable to the saving the Sustainable Markets Initiative estimates from more digital trials.
• - The real bottleneck for circularity isn't the technology, it's convincing the actors in the trial supply chain that circular is just as safe, compliant and high-performance as linear.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
02:00 Meet Alejandra: from Mexico to Nancy
03:00 What Quipment does: equipping and maintaining trial sites
05:00 The portfolio: ECGs, infusion pumps, data loggers and 3,000+ products
07:00 Becoming a B Corp: how the assessment revealed a circular model
09:00 Circular by design: rent, return, reprocess, redeploy
13:00 Where circularity breaks down in clinical trials
16:00 The cost question: services at the same price
18:00 Informing the choice: tools over mandates
19:00 The Quipment Carbon Compass: a comparator, not a calculator
20:00 40% carbon reduction, linear vs circular
23:00 The new seven-pillar B Corp standard
25:00 What gives Alejandra hope

References and links:
Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, Community of Practice for Clinical Trials: https://shcoalition.org/sustainable-clinical-trials-knowledge-hub/
B Corp certification (B Lab): https://www.bcorporation.net/
Quipment B Corp profile: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/quipment-sas/
Alejandra Medina on LinkedIn: https://fr.linkedin.com/in/alejandra-medina-3315185
Quipment: https://www.quipment.com/

You might also enjoy:
Episode 102, Sustainable Clinical Trials (1): Convien & myoncare with Christian Hieronimi: https://carepathwayconsulting.com/podcast/podcast-episode-102/

Host links:
Joachim Almdal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joachim-espeland-almdal-017a6973/
Frederik van Deurs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederikvandeurs/
Care Pathway Consulting: https://carepathwayconsulting.com

"Quipment Carbon Compass isn't a calculator, it's a comparator. We didn't change anything; we just changed the way we explain our business. We were circular by design from the beginning." - Alejandra Medina