UF Health and PepsiCo Inc. will help UF Health Shands Hospital be environmentally conscious with an essay contest called It Pays to Think Green.
Winning ideas from the contest will be used at Shands through a grant, said Christy Morgan, a contest finalist.
The competitors, who are all Shands employees, had to come up with an idea about promoting sustainability at the hospital, Morgan said.
Essay submissions were due July 21 Jacky Scott, a public relations specialist in strategic communications for UF Health, wrote in an email. There were 76 entries, and four finalists were chosen, Scott said.
The entries were reviewed by a panel of judges, including representatives from Pepsi, Shands and the UF Office of Sustainability, according to the contest’s website.
Finalists were chosen Aug. 11, Scott said. The voting period for the public began Aug. 28 and ended Sept. 8, but the winner has not been announced, she said.
Two physical therapists at Shands Rehab Center, Morgan and her colleague Debi Jones, are finalists in the competition.
Their entry, Save the Trees, aims to reduce paper used in the UF Health Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine Institute. With the current system, therapists can only access one patient’s electronic record at a time, Morgan said.
Because therapists in the outpatient clinic see multiple patients at a time, they have to print each patient’s entire record, which can be up to 12 pages long, she said. There are 19 therapists in Morgan’s clinic, and together they can use between 400 to 2,400 pieces of paper per day. The paper can’t be recycled because it holds confidential patient information, Morgan said.
Changing the system to view multiple records at once would be cost friendly and benefit patient care, Morgan said.
Michelle Musalo, a physical therapist at the UF Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, said the current system is time consuming.
“It’s very difficult and inefficient to close one patient record and then open another to log information for another patient,” Musalo said, adding that changing the system would help make the department more environmentally sustainable.
As a result of Morgan and Jones’ submission, Musalo said UF Information Technology is working with the therapists to implement their idea, whether they win or lose.
