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?

Janne Pesu and Helinä Melkas discussed the positive and negative environmental impacts of e-health.
Janne Pesu and Helinä Melkas discussed the positive and negative environmental impacts of e-health.
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

Du kan laste ned podkasten til mobilen din på Apple Podcasts, Spotify eller Podbean. Søk etter "Norwegian Centre for E-health Research".