The transition to remote medicine came with major carbon emissions: study
The use of carbon dioxide emissions from a distance decreased, equivalent to up to 130,000 cars that fed the gas monthly in 2023, and a new study was identified.
These results indicate that remote medicine can have a modest but concrete contribution to curbing the traces of climate change, according to the study, which was published in the American Journal of Careful Care on Tuesday.
“While Congress discusses whether to expand or adjust flexibility in the field of health care in the era of the epidemic, our results provide important evidence for policy makers,” John Mavi, Associate Professor at David Given College of Medicine said in a statement.
Specifically, these considerations can focus on the idea “that medication from a distance has the ability to reduce carbon emissions to provide US health care.”
Today, the American health system is responsible for about 9 percent of local greenhouse gas emissions – which exacerbates the effects of climate change and thus pose a potential threat to human health, according to the authors.
Meanwhile, since the transportation sector represents more than 28 percent of the country’s total emissions, the authors have argued that remote medicine will have the ability to reduce the environmental footprint of health care services.
To extract their conclusions, the researchers used the emerging experience database in Milliman Medinsight to determine approximately 1.5 million visits remotely, including 66,000 in rural areas, from April 1 to June 30, 2023.
In the end, they estimated that between 741,000 and 1.35 million of those visits occurred instead of personal dates.
As a result of this shift to remote medicine, researchers estimated carbon emissions cuts ranging from 21.4 million and 47.6 million kilograms per month.
This quantity is almost equivalent to carbon dioxide cut from 61,000 to 130,000 gas -operating cars every month or by recycling 1.8 million to 4 million cars, according to the study.
The researchers acknowledged that there are some restrictions on the results they reached, including the fact that the results were based on a single resource that is easy to reach instead of a random choice. They also indicated that the use of remote medicine has decreased since the end of the epidemic – which may lead to exaggeration in the estimates related to emissions.
However, they emphasized that remote medicine does not provide a great opportunity to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thus achieve benefits for human health.
The co -author said a. Mark Federick, director of the value -based insurance design center at the University of Michigan, in a statement, “The health care sector contributes greatly to the global carbon markpoine.”
“The environmental impact of medical care can be reduced when low carbon options, such as remote medicine, are replaced by other services that produce more emissions,” Federick added.
