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Can virtual care ease the climate crisis?
Hospitals eager to stem their impact on the environment are pointing to telehealth as a key strategy — but data on the effects of digital health on the climate crisis are slim, my colleague Katie Palmer reports. “Digital health is late to the party,” Enrico Coiera, a digital health researcher at Macquarie University, tells Katie. “It’s very early days in terms of what the evidence says.”
At least one study suggests that virtual appointments could reduce carbon emissions by saving on travel to an on-site exam room. But digital health could also lead to an increase in emissions because of factors like data storage, Katie writes. Digital health could have both upstream and downstream environmental costs, Coiera said. “I would take with a grain of salt any study that says any one thing is a solution,” said Coiera. Read Katie’s full story here.
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