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Since the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual medical consults have become a convenient way for patients to seek out healthcare. It eliminates the need to travel to the appointment and allows each party to be protected from contagious conditions. Now, a new British study explores the environmental impact of online medical consultations.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual medical consults have become a convenient way for patients to seek out healthcare. It eliminates the need to travel to the appointment and allows each party to be protected from contagious conditions. Now, a new British study explores the environmental impact of online medical consultations.
Virtual medical consultations could become a key component in the sustainability strategy of the world of healthcare according to a new study from Oxford University. According to the findings published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, this approach to appointments could reduce the industry's carbon footprint.
As a result of the Covid 19 pandemic, remote consultations became standard, as a measure to protect the health of both patient and practitioner. Today, they have become a normal element of our daily lives. In many areas, physicians who offer remote consultations with their patients have become the majority. This massive implementation of virtual care could have a variety of knock-on effects including in terms of health care's environmental sustainability. A team of researchers from the University of Oxford has undertaken a study to investigate the impact in that area.
The researchers reviewed 1672 published studies and selected 23 that represented a variety of virtual consulting equipment and platforms in different clinical conditions and services. With telemedicine appointments, including video and telephone visits, patient travel time for personal appointments was significantly reduced; thus, virtual consultation could be an effective way for authorities to achieve environmental sustainability goals. The studies selected used different methods and approaches to estimate carbon savings, but despite their methodological variations, they all concluded that virtual consultations significantly reduced carbon emissions.
However, most of this research did not address factors related to patients' qualitative experience and the setups that would have an impact on to what extent and how successfully virtual appointments are accepted and used.
"Health systems urgently need to become more environmentally sustainable. Our review clearly shows that virtual consultations offer one means to help with that. While adoption and spread of virtual consulting needs to be considered alongside a range of system, organizational, clinical and patient-related factors, when done well and at scale, they offer significant potential for carbon savings, primarily (but not only) through reductions in travel. The pandemic brought a big shift to virtual care -- this is set to continue, and our findings suggest it will help to mitigate the effects of climate change," outlined Professor Sara Shaw, lead author from Oxford University, in the press release.
Of course, other environmental impacts such as e-waste generated by telemedicine need to be assessed in the future. According to the researchers, there is a need for virtual consulting services to analyze the potential for emissions reductions and weigh them against the potential benefits and risks (eg, missed diagnoses) of boosting such services.
