Telehealth may help reduce medicine's carbon footprint

"A large-scale study recently published in The Journal of Climate Change and Health found that an increase in telehealth use in the Pacific Northwest corresponded to a dramatic decrease in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.

The study – a collaboration among researchers from Northwest Permanente, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School – examined six years of outpatient care at Kaiser Permanente Northwest, which serves more than 600,000 people in Oregon and Washington.

"Prior to the pandemic, despite rising total visit volume, transportation-associated emissions were already declining due to a greater proportion of telehealth visits," observed the researchers.

WHY IT MATTERS

As the study notes, the healthcare sector is a "significant source" of greenhouse gas emissions. From 2010 to 2018, emissions from the U.S. healthcare industry increased by 6 percent.

Although many of those emissions arise directly from facilities or indirectly from the supply chain, researchers note that patient transportation to clinics also plays a role in healthcare's carbon footprint.

"To date, there are no large-scale studies of emissions reductions due to telehealth across an entire ambulatory system of a regional healthcare system in the United States, nor any studies showing the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare-associated [greenhouse gas] emissions as a result of rapid telehealth adoption," they explained..." Lire la suite