Wakeup call! Environmentally friendly e-health
Is meeting your patients online really better for the planet than driving all over town?
How can we identify and measure the environmental impacts of digital healthcare services?
Every digitalization action also causes negative climate impacts. Think carefully about your case before getting started.
You saved a tree by sending a digital prescription to the pharmacy rather than a fax. But what about the pollution from huge piles of trashed computers and smart phones? Or if the server your digital patient health record is stored on is run by coal-powered electricity?
Wakeup call! Perhaps we are not as environmentally friendly as we thought.
Presentation by Janne Pesu, group manager, Finnish Environment Institute (Syke) and Helinä Melkas, professor, LUT University.
Digitalization is seen as one way to reduce the negative environmental impacts of public social and healthcare services. In order to know if we are meeting our sustainability goals, we need theoretical and practical tools.
Pesu
and Melkas have studied the ecological footprint of digital
home care services and remote health appointments in
two case studies. They will give examples of practical tasks that you can use
when assessing e-health at your institution.
Recording
You can download the podcast to your mobile on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podbean. Search for ‘Norwegian Centre for E-health Research’.