SASB Medical Equipment & Supplies

1. Identify applicability: Visit the SASB Standards Navigator at sasb.org to confirm that the Medical Equipment & Supplies standard applies to your organization's primary business activities.

1. Download the standard: Access the full Medical Equipment & Supplies standard for free from the SASB website. Review the disclosure topics, accounting metrics, and activity metrics defined for the industry.

1. Conduct a materiality assessment: Map the SASB-defined disclosure topics — product quality & safety, energy management, employee health & safety, and ethical marketing — against your organization's existing data and reporting gaps.

1. Assemble a cross-functional team: Engage sustainability, finance, legal, operations, and investor relations teams to assign ownership of each disclosure topic and metric.

1. Collect and validate data: Gather quantitative and qualitative data for each SASB accounting metric across the relevant reporting period (typically a fiscal year). Ensure data is traceable and auditable.

1. Draft disclosures: Incorporate SASB-aligned disclosures into your annual report, sustainability report, or SEC filings (e.g., 10-K). Reference SASB explicitly and use the standard's defined units and methodologies.

1. Consider third-party assurance: Optionally engage an external auditor or assurance provider to verify your disclosures, which can enhance credibility with investors.

1. Register and communicate: Submit your disclosure to the SASB Standards Navigator company database and communicate your SASB alignment to investors, analysts, and other stakeholders.

The SASB Medical Equipment & Supplies standard defines four primary disclosure topics, each with specific quantitative accounting metrics and qualitative activity metrics that organizations are expected to report on.

Product Quality & Safety is the most prominent topic, covering recalls, regulatory actions, and product liability. Key metrics include the number and aggregate volume of product recalls, the number of fatalities and injuries linked to products, and the total amount of monetary losses from legal proceedings related to product safety.

Selling & Marketing Practices addresses ethical promotion of medical products, particularly to healthcare professionals. Organizations disclose the total amount of monetary losses from legal proceedings associated with improper marketing or billing practices, and describe their policies and procedures for ethical sales and marketing.

Energy Management in Manufacturing covers operational environmental performance, including total energy consumed, the percentage from grid electricity versus self-generated sources, and the percentage from renewable energy. This reflects the sector's significant manufacturing footprint.

Employee Health & Safety requires disclosure of total recordable incident rate (TRIR), fatality rate, and near-miss frequency rate for manufacturing and field operations, benchmarked against industry norms.

Activity metrics — such as number of units produced by product category and number of employees — provide context for normalizing the above disclosures and enabling peer comparisons. All metrics are defined with specific units, boundaries, and methodologies in the standard document to ensure consistency across reporting organizations.

SASB standards have become one of the most widely referenced ESG disclosure frameworks globally, particularly among institutional investors and publicly traded companies. As of the mid-2020s, over 3,000 companies across 77 industries reference SASB standards in their sustainability or financial disclosures, with adoption concentrated in North America but growing rapidly in Europe and Asia-Pacific. In the healthcare and medical devices sector specifically, major companies such as Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, Becton Dickinson, and Stryker have publicly aligned their ESG reporting with SASB, lending the framework significant credibility and peer pressure for adoption.

A pivotal development occurred in 2022 when the IFRS Foundation consolidated SASB under the newly formed International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The ISSB's inaugural standards (IFRS S1 and S2) explicitly incorporate SASB's industry-specific metrics as the recommended basis for industry-level disclosure, effectively elevating SASB from a voluntary framework to a foundational layer of the emerging global mandatory disclosure regime. This integration has dramatically increased SASB's relevance, particularly for companies operating in jurisdictions moving toward mandatory ISSB-aligned reporting.

Compared to alternatives, SASB's key differentiator is its industry-specific, investor-focused materiality approach — unlike GRI, which is broader and stakeholder-oriented, or TCFD, which is climate-specific. For the medical equipment sector, SASB's focus on product safety and ethical marketing resonates strongly with the sector's regulatory environment. Demand for SASB-aligned disclosure is growing, driven by SEC climate disclosure rules, EU CSRD requirements referencing ISSB, and investor coalitions such as the PRI and TCFD supporters mandating or strongly encouraging SASB adoption.

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) was founded in 2011 by Jean Rogers in San Francisco, California, with a mission to develop industry-specific sustainability accounting standards that help businesses disclose financially material ESG information to investors. Modeled loosely on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), SASB was designed to fill a gap in capital markets: while financial accounting had rigorous, standardized rules, sustainability disclosure was fragmented and largely incomparable. SASB's approach was distinctive in that it used evidence-based research and multi-stakeholder consultation to identify which sustainability topics are likely to be financially material for each of 77 industries — rather than applying a one-size-fits-all framework.

The Medical Equipment & Supplies standard was developed as part of SASB's Health Care sector standards, with provisional standards released around 2013–2014 and codified standards finalized by 2018 following extensive industry and investor consultation. A major milestone came in 2022 when the IFRS Foundation acquired SASB and integrated its standards into the newly formed International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The ISSB's IFRS S1 standard formally references SASB industry-specific metrics as the recommended approach for industry-level disclosure, transforming SASB from a voluntary U.S.-centric framework into a cornerstone of the emerging global sustainability disclosure architecture. SASB standards are now maintained and updated by the ISSB under the IFRS Foundation umbrella.