Can digital health make a dent in climate change?

Earth Day celebrations taking place around the world mark an appropriate time to consider the urgency of climate change: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” 

That proclamation arrived late last month within the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. But why does it matter to healthcare organizations? 

Because the industry creates an outsized amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and has a clear opportunity to deploy digital consumer experiences to impactfully reduce healthcare sector emissions — a concept supported by pandemic-era statistics. What’s more, taking action today is not just a matter of doing the environmentally correct thing, either, as consumers are increasingly demanding that brands address climate change. 

Let’s look at each of those realities separately. 

The impact: healthcare’s contribution to climate change

Globally, healthcare organizations contribute 4.6% of CO2 emissions and in the U.S. that statistic is even higher at 8.5%, according to the Commonwealth Fund. 

To put climate change’s impact into human context, research published in The Lancet determined that in 2019 approximately 1.8 million people died across the globe as a result of atmospheric particulate matter caused by greenhouse gases and other pollutants. 

Particular to the U.S., 18 weather and climate disasters cost at least $1 billion each last year, meaning 2022 is tied with 2011 and 2017 for the third-highest number of billion-dollar disasters in a 12-month span, trailing 2020 and 2021, which experienced 22 and 20 adverse events, respectively. Climate.gov even dubbed 2010-2019 “a landmark decade of weather and climate disasters.”  

It’s no wonder climate change is already taking a toll on the physical and mental health of individuals. The National Institute for Healthcare Management Foundation (NIHCM) said that both acute climate events and longer-term change have 67% of Americans indicating that climate change is already impacting the population’s health and 55% are anxious about its influence on their mental health. NIHCM also projected that between 25-50% of people exposed to extreme weather are at risk of anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or suicide. The World Health Organization cut to the chase in a mid-2022 policy brief: Climate action must include mental health, but only nine of 95 surveyed countries had done so.  

Billion-dollar disasters, millions of human lives lost and the increase in mental health issues related to rising temperatures are undeniably daunting — but the events of 2020 to today have highlighted a potential area for healthcare executives to strategically make a difference. 

The opportunity: digital and virtual tools are already cutting carbon emissions 

When COVID-19 began spreading across the world, healthcare organizations embraced digital technologies — including telehealth, triage chatbots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, among other digital tools — to more effectively engage consumers almost overnight in the pandemic response. Three years later, research illustrates that virtual health significantly reduced CO2 emissions. 

Take the case of UC Davis Health. From January 2020 through December 2021, the health system reduced patient travel some 54 million miles by leveraging digital experiences and telephone-based interactions, thereby saving close to 21,466 metric tons or the “equivalent to a year’s worth of CO2 emissions from the electricity of 4,177 U.S. homes,” UC Davis Health noted.  

“Even if only 25% of ambulatory visits were conducted via telehealth, there would still be substantial cost savings and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” said James Marcin, Director of the UC Davis Center for Health and Technology, professor of pediatrics and senior author of a study about telehealth’s carbon footprint. 

UC Davis Health is not the only healthcare organization to meaningfully impact carbon emissions. In Spain, the private payvider Sanitas decreased CO2 emissions by a net total of 6,655 tons via reduced levels of patient travel that resulted from replacing in-person appointments with digital visits and access to test results and medical reports, authors explained in the journal Nature. 

Focusing on the use case of cancer care specifically, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that a National Cancer Institute-designated facility reduced carbon emissions through 49,329 telemedicine visits between April 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Specifically, virtual care decreased emissions by an estimated 424,471 kg among patients living within 60 minutes of the cancer center. For patients living outside that 60-minute radius, digital healthcare experiences saved a total of 2,744,248 kg, which JAMA equated to 591 passenger vehicles driven for a year. 

With the scope of healthcare’s contribution to climate change more clearly understood and the CO2 reductions achieved through digital health experiences since 2020, health plans and health systems are increasingly facing consumers and markets that demand immediate action. 

The growing challenge: real action is needed now 

It’s no secret that the multiple crises of the 2020s — COVID-19, social injustices, health disparities, workforce shortages and continued rising costs — have led to an increase in activism. Research by Deloitte published in the Wall Street Journal estimated that 38% of participants had actively engaged in attending a protest, donated to campaigns or causes or signed a petition. And when the firm analyzed responses from people living in six different countries, “reducing carbon emissions was a near-universal priority.” 

“Consumers expect businesses to step up when it comes to climate change and the environment,” Deloitte wrote in the WSJ article. “To adapt to the growing demand for action, organizations can work harder to anticipate shifts in public opinion. By identifying and responding to such shifts, C-suite leaders can make their organizations more resilient to risk. What’s more, executives can build consumer loyalty and drive revenue growth by aligning their actions to stakeholder values.” 

The risks to the planet of inaction include delayed mitigation of climate change’s negative impact, the current high-emissions infrastructure continuing to be locked-in, escalating costs of addressing the problem and an even greater toll on human health, the IPCC outlined in its report. 

On the business side for healthcare organizations, there are also pressing financial challenges. Lazard’s Analysis of Corporate Climate Messaging and its Financial Impacts report, for instance, explained that investors are scrutinizing climate and environmental risks to corporations and “capital markets are attentive to the risks” as well. 

“Committing to future emissions reductions does not seem to be rewarded by the stock market,” Peter Orzsag, CEO of Financial Advisory at Lazard and a former Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “In this sense, investors want to see action, not words — and will reward firms as emissions actually come down, not for promises to do so in the future.” 

What healthcare needs next: a new consumer experience (CX) tech stack

As illustrated in our State of Healthcare CX 2023 report, the industry is at a critical juncture. Two-thirds of C-suites have already mandated CX transformation necessary to enable the aforementioned virtual care offerings healthcare organizations can leverage to reduce CO2 emissions — not to mention advance other business goals, including expanding market share, increasing revenue, reducing costs and improving health outcomes — yet only one-third have mature initiatives to do so. 

In addition to climate change, organizations are facing macroeconomic pressures, increased administrative and IT expenses, threats to their market share posed by new entrants with more resources, patient and member turnover and failing returns on their investments in disconnected point solutions. While EHR deployments, cloud migrations and digital health tools have set the foundation, the next step is a CX technology platform to integrate those pieces together into seamless, personalized experiences. 

Healthcare organizations are now facing converging inflection points — climate change, macroeconomic conditions, the evolving healthcare landscape, new competitive threats and deep inequities in the system, among others — all of which signal the urgent need to transform consumer experiences to improve overall outcomes.