Introducing Climate Health Informatics | 11/19
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Deep dive: Introducing Climate Health Informatics
Informatics enables us to break down complex interactions of climate data and health data into a more tangible scope. It connects across silos to quantify, analyze, and identify trends between climate change, our health, and health systems. Additionally, informatics is the basis for designing and developing scalable clinical and public health digital solutions. Lastly, informatics serves as a powerful tool for empowering change-makers across communities and policy spheres, providing data visualization and advocacy tools to effectively communicate and address climate health challenges.
Climate Health Informatics (CHI) is an emerging subspecialty focused on the application of data science and information technology to understand, mitigate, and address the impacts of climate change on human health. In this deep dive, we'll focus on CHI in terms of mitigation and adaptation. As these facets of CHI often intersect, such as how telehealth encompasses mitigation (reducing travel emissions) and adaptation (responding to pandemic situations), this will be a broad overview, offering specific examples to educate and inspire change.
Mitigation: Decarbonizing Healthcare
CHI is key in reducing healthcare's carbon footprint. Through data science and standards, we can better understand and manage the environmental impacts of clinical decisions. For instance, life cycle assessments in healthcare, like those used in radiotherapy by CHILL co-founder Dr. Katie Lichter at the UCSF GreenHealth Lab, provide a comprehensive view of the environmental footprint of medical practices. Similarly, one life cycle assessment showed how telemedicine significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, emphasizing how CHI can be used to quantify how technical clinical alternatives improve healthcare’s carbon footprint.
These findings inform best practices to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining clinical integrity. CHI enables the use of clinical decision support (CDS) tools, which are aids within electronic health record systems that integrate clinical and climate guidelines, to encourage more sustainable choices. For example in anesthesiology, using CDS can help promote sevoflurane over desflurane, a high CO2-emitting gas, and can drastically reduce the carbon footprint of surgical procedures without negatively impacting clinical care.
In operating rooms, which are much more energy-intensive and waste-producing than other hospital areas, CHI can play a significant role. By integrating dashboards that track environmental data like electricity usage, initiatives like the 'Power Down' project can be monitored for effectiveness. This project, which involved turning off unused anesthesia and operating room equipment, saved thousands of dollars and significantly reduced CO2 emissions.
Adaptation: Predicting Healthcare Needs
Integrating environmental and weather data with health information systems, though challenging, is fundamental to developing a healthcare system responsive to climate change. With extreme weather events becoming more frequent and severe, CHI is used for adaptive healthcare by enabling environmental data and predictive analytics for personalized care guidance. For example, a study analyzing air quality and COPD exacerbations used univariate and multivariate analyses to identify risk factors; with another upcoming study presented at the recent American Medical Informatics Association 2023 Symposium used machine learning models to integrate these factors with air quality data to predict COPD exacerbations.
CHI enables the implementation of patient and clinician-facing tools, incorporating personalized care models into clinical support systems and digital health tools. From a public health perspective, CHI enhances emergency preparedness by integrating patient data with tools like Heat Health Warning Systems, enabling health systems to anticipate patient influx during heat waves and identify key locations for services and cooling centers.
Through these innovative strategies, CHI equips patients, providers, and health systems to effectively navigate the challenges posed by extreme weather events, while simultaneously working to reduce our impact on climate change.
Other news
TIME magazine put out its inaugural list of the 100 most influential climate leaders in business (Time).
The Lancet Countdown on Climate and Health released its 2023 report (Lancet)
With the release of the 5th National Climate Assessment, President Biden announced more than $6 billion in investments to increase community resilience to the impacts of climate change, including by strengthening America’s aging electric grid infrastructure, reducing flood risk to communities, supporting conservation efforts, and advancing environmental justice (White House).
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Data For Good published a report that describes climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and behaviors among Facebook users in 110 countries, territories, and geographic groups. (Yale)