Central Line episode 134: Sustainable ORs

Praveen Kalra, MBBS, MD, FCCP, FASA

Praveen Kalra, MBBS, MD, FCCP, FASA, is board certified in anesthesia and in critical care. He specializes in trauma, orthopedic, brain and spine surgery, urology, and cancer surgery. Dr. Kalra was appointed medical director of sustainability for Stanford Healthcare in December 2023. His professional interests include devising protocols for patient safety, informed consent, reducing the impact of anesthetics on the environment, addressing climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the health care setting, resident education to emphasize evidence based safe care and mentoring medical students. He has been in practice for over 19 years.

Dr. Kalra completed his residency in anesthesia from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and a fellowship in critical care from Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He received the Inaugural Sustainability Ambassador Award in 2022 at Stanford Health Care for removing Desflurane (anesthetic gas with highest global warming potential) from the OR and undertaking multiple initiatives such as creating a Green Team at SHC, an elective 2-week Green Rotation for residents, green curriculum video series and addressing plastic & biohazardous waste in the OR. Current projects are focused on decommissioning nitrous oxide pipelines in the OR.

Matthew Meyer, MD

Matthew Meyer, MD, is a sustainable healthcare researcher and advocate, a steering-committee member of Virginia Clinicians for CIimate Action, and co-chair of the UVA Health Sustainability Committee. He served as a public health volunteer in the Peace Corps Tanzania and trained clinically at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has published editorials on climate health and sustainable healthcare in Scientific American, STAT News, Health Affairs Forefront and The Hill. His research focuses on eliminating the unnecessary waste of sterile surgical supplies and instruments in the operating room, and he co-founded PeriOp Green to help health systems use computer vision and advanced analytics to do exactly that. He works clinically as an anesthesiologist and intensivist, and is an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Virginia.

Adam Striker, MD, FASA

Adam Striker, MD, FASA, is the past chair of the ASA’s Committee on Communications and is the series editor for ASA’s Central Line podcast series. He is Professor of Anesthesiology at Medical College of Wisconsin, a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist at Children’s Wisconsin and serves as Director of Clinical Operations for pediatric anesthesiology at Children's Wisconsin.  He received his undergraduate degree in engineering from Purdue University and his medical degree from Indiana University. He completed his pediatric anesthesiology fellowship at Northwestern University.