How healthcare ecosystem is leveraging digital technologies to address sustainability including waste management, health outcomes in healthcare delivery as well as research?
As we live longer, it is critically important that we live healthier lives and our footprint on natural resource consumption is a sustainable one. TCS harnesses digital technologies like AI & Gen AI, IoMT, Cloud, AR/VR/XR/MR to help its customers achieve improved health outcomes, disease prevention, and health equity along with waste management, green procurement, and reducing hazardous product usage & carbon emissions to help our customers accelerate their sustainability maturity.
Green healthcare is possible across distributors, pharmacies, hospital procurement processes and MedTech distribution. TCS helps its customers optimize resource allocation, reduces redundant tests, and improves supply chain efficiency using AI. End-to-end carbon tracking is possible across procurement (economic order quantity or EOQ), stocking and inventory, manufacturing (planning production batch sizes), packaging, distribution (warehousing, fleet management), reverse logistics to make logistics adaptive, resilient, and green. TCS TwinX – the digital twin platform, and product life cycle profiler enable such supply chain optimization.
Limited shelf-life inventory like drugs need special attention to minimize waste due to expiry. FIFO based inventory management and EOQ-based procurement can help reduce waste and make procurement more sustainable. AI/Gen AI based Digital Formulary designs are helping Pharmacy Benefit Managers to make the formularies financially sustainable and optimized for positive health outcomes. TCS’ AI/GenAI solutions educate patients on drug disposal hazards and encourage them to return unrequired and expired medications for safe disposal by pharmacies, to minimize environmental impact.
Payer processes can be paper intense by way of mail, FAX transmissions. TCS’ solutions like AR/AI/GenAI based medication adherence, explanation of benefits (EOB), digital scribing of homebound nurse notes (both voice and text) are few of the digitalized interventions for care management with cascading benefits across the payer value chain and can up the game on green transition.
TCS’ hybrid care interventions through telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), ageing in place solutions, AI enabled digital companions, and digital front doors for patient intake are reducing patients’ visits to hospitals, thereby, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing travel for care givers and patients.
For medical device manufacturers, TCS helps its customers to make operations more sustainable with digital product design, design simulations, device testing simulations, digital marketing, electronic product collaterals, manuals, training materials, etc,. The design process is now swinging towards device miniaturization, multi-parameter/multi-channel devices, SAMD/SIMD from analog, use of TinyML, and edge computing to minimize use of virgin raw materials.
What are TCS' efforts and investments in advancing sustainable energy solutions for clients in the energy sector?
The key challenge for the energy sector is to deliver green energy at an affordable price while meeting the rising global energy demand. We see four approaches to this:
- A new energy mix:
Companies moving to a new energy mix including renewables and storage; and low carbon fuels like biofuels. Natural gas is the driver of the transition. - Hyper-efficient operations:
Efficiency improvements that profoundly reduce the energy demand and emissions including deeper electrification and a select focus from molecules to electrons. - New ecosystems:
That contain renewables, hydrogen, energy services, carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), e-mobility, storage at scale, grid modernization, peer to peer trading, heat pumps and power to X. - The energy cost of intelligence: We at TCS, see this as an emergent pillar. The cost of energy for technologies like GenAI (LLMs), blockchain, is increasing with large investments in infrastructure. This is a crucial inflexion point, where, for the first time in human history, software is ahead of the available compute capacity.
TCS has a unique vantage point for the green transition: driving digital transformations across the value-chain to accelerate the green transition.
- Refinery 4.0
Refineries account for 50% of emissions from the energy sector. To optimize energy consumption and drive emission efficiencies, TCS developed a narrow AI-led real-time plant-wide mass balance and broad AI based real-time operations risk advisor that improve asset availability and agility. - Drilling twins
Extraction and drilling account for 10% of Scope 1 emissions from oil and gas. TCS’ industry-first digital twin platform for one of the world’s largest drilling fleets, optimized all drilling plans for emissions via simulations, before actual drilling. This reduced emissions by 8% through efficiencies. - TCS’ energy-as-a-service platform enables customers to choose the right energy mix by balancing cost and the green quotient. TCS is also building the technology spine for a nation’s EV charging network.
- Fusion energy
TCS is a partner contributing to ITER (a 32-country big-science project) that harnesses plasma for fusion energy, to shape the future energy landscape.
How TCS leverages its data analytics capabilities to help organizations in various sectors monitor and reduce their environmental impact, promoting sustainable business practices?
TCS’ vision for Digital Sustainability is that a single digital core drives business efficiencies and actions that make an enterprise more sustainable. Data is the fulcrum of this digital core and green transition is also a large data challenge.
Examples of co-creating the future with our customers:
- Building a sustainability data back bone (SDB) for a global car brand to address their Net Zero goals. They source from over 5000 suppliers. The SDB platform orchestrates many technologies and diverse data sources to measure, track, and report on emissions and energy consumption. TCS piloted this at 3 manufacturing sites to save over 5M GBP per annum as well as 20 KT CO2e.
- Transforming unconventional energy assets
An oil and gas super-major, operates > 4000 automated coal seam gas wells. TCS’ award-winning DNAaaS (Data and Analytics as a Service) helped reduce flaring percentages by 80% and avoided hundreds of thousands of kilometers of travel to sites for maintenance. - TCS’ Renewable Technology Management Platform tracks wind farm assets in real time for a utilities major. This helps them achieve their Net Zero goals 3 years ahead of time with 90% emission reduction achieved so far.
- TCS implemented a 5 minutes’ settlement program for the energy market in Australia as against the existing 30-minute settlement. This now enables the market to cope with higher renewable penetration thanks to the enhanced agility.
- Transportation modeler: This data analytics solution for a pharma major evaluates alternative transportation and shipping scenarios to reduce CO2 emissions and drive efficiencies in the supply chain.
TCS' role in driving eco-friendly innovations in life sciences, including sustainable drug development processes and the reduction of carbon footprint in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
The Life Sciences industry is focusing on a multi-dimensional approach to mitigate impact on environment by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, hazardous waste, Pharmaceutical-In-Environment (PIE), medical waste disposal, etc,. Some key focus Green Innovation initiatives across Life Sciences enterprise value-chain are:
1.Research and Development
- Green chemistry: Design of chemical products and processes to reduce or eliminate the generation of hazardous substance.
- Sustainable medical devices product design by reducing material waste enabled by innovation, design to extend life of medical products, or single use to multi use design or enabling recycling and repurposing.
TCS is helping a large US based medical device company to re-design single use surgical devices into re-sterilizable ones saving significant amount of plastic waste. For a large US based pharma, TCS is developing an in-silico hypodermal skin to reduce animal and human testing.
2.Manufacturing
- Eco-friendly packaging: Adopting biodegradable materials, or reusable thermal packaging
- Manufacturing waste management: Reuse and recycle of waste
- Reducing carbon footprint: Investing in energy efficient operations and renewable energy sources
- Additive manufacturing in medical devices: Reducing waste by eliminating plastic overproduction and improving supply chain efficiencies
For a large Japan based pharma, TCS is reducing manufacturing waste using an AI based approach to optimise single-use bags. For a global orthopaedic major, TCS is personalizing 3D printed cutting block and guides for knee arthroplasty. For various customers, TCS Clever EnergyTM, is enabling CO2 emission reductions.
- Supply chain
- Sustainable transportation: Logistics optimization by adopting route optimization, alternate fuel, etc,.
- Supply chain waste reduction with return and recycling initiatives
- Circular economy: Reusing or recycling products and materials
TCS is helping a large UK based pharma in pallet consumption reduction by optimizing shipper size. For a large US based Med Tech, TCS used blockchain to eliminate paper-based tracking of products for chain of custody.
- Commercial / Post marketed products
Digital marketing is reducing paper waste, through digital collaterals, virtual events, and campaigns. For instance, TCS helped a US based Med Tech major in building “HCP Engagement and Collaboration Platform” to enable sharing of digital marketing collaterals and learning aids.
What are the green transition initiatives that TCS is driving inside its own organization? How does TCS collaborates with its ecosystem partners (start-ups, academia, customers, and niche providers) to develop green technologies and promote sustainability across industries?
TCS had set a target to reduce its absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 70% by 2025 and become Net Zero by 2030. We are well ahead of our initial Scope 1 and 2 targets and have achieved a reduction of 80% in Scope 1 and 2 emissions in FY 2024 over a baseline of 2016, by increasing use of renewable sources of energy and improving energy efficiency. TCS’ strategy for reducing emissions includes addition of more green buildings, reduction of IT system power usage, responsible sourcing, and the use of TCS Clever EnergyTM, to optimize energy consumption across campuses.
TCS collaborates with TÜV SÜD Middle East leveraging the TCS Zero Carbon platform to help our clients accelerate their Net Zero goals. TCS and Rolls Royce are partnering on a hydrogen research program, where hydrogen can be a zero-carbon aviation fuel of the future. There are many other such collaborations.
TCS’ investments in green transition include TCS SustainathonTM, which empowers youngsters to solve real world sustainability challenges through technology.
TCS also helps clients accelerate their sustainability innovation, leveraging the TCS Pace Port™ network of co-innovation hubs across various global locations to ideate on most pressing sustainability concerns, rapidly prototype the most promising solution and build them. The Energy Forward Studio at the Paris PacePort is a platform that provides ‘Innovation as a Service’ to achieve futuristic energy goals with a curated partner ecosystem.
Sports sponsorship is aligned with our conviction to be a true transformation partner for all our stakeholders. Sports that promote wellbeing, like endurance running and all-electric motorsport, are natural partners for us.
TCS Energy Forward Run Club is TCS' only industry-specific run club exclusively for senior executives from the energy sector. The members of this club come together to train for TCS NYC Marathon, one of the most challenging endurance races, while raising donations for sustainability charities.
As Official Technology Partner of Jaguar TCS Racing, together TCS and JLR leveraged the power of technology to realize the vision for a more sustainable world, both on and off the track. Technology developed and proven on-track by Jaguar TCS Racing supports the next generation of Jaguar all-electric vehicles, as Jaguar is reimagined to become an all-electric brand from 2025. Through the Race to Inspire mission, Jaguar TCS Racing inspire the future generation by using the race program to create a positive impact on planet and the communities -- from competing in the world’s first net carbon race car to supporting and training the next generation of engineers and motorsport professionals.
