Why is it important to consider environmental issues in Virtual Care?
Digital technologies and infrastructure have environmental impacts associated with the energy needed to collect, store, process, and analyse data. While it is extremely difficult to quantify, estimates suggest that the digital sector accounts for between 2.1-3.9% of global greenhouse emissions (Freitag 2021). The digital sector also has environmental impacts associated with the mining of natural resources needed to build digital technologies and infrastructure; the use of other resources, such as water, to provide systems to cool digital servers during use, and the disposal of electronic/hardware waste. It is important that we mitigate these environmental impacts as much as possible, not only to protect the environment, but also as a commitment to health, since environmental impacts adversely affect health, both directly and indirectly.
There is evidence that virtual care has the potential to reduce the environmental impacts of healthcare in certain scenarios, in particular where virtual care is expected to simply “replace” in person care. However, there are multiple caveats around this, and many scenarios in which virtual care is not expected to be a “replacement”. It is therefore important to consider the environmental impacts of any virtual care service.