Health technologies can reduce environmental impacts, by cutting travel and optimising resources, but their effects are complex and not yet fully understood, highlighting the need for further research.
How do health technologies impact the environment?
The healthcare system is designed to keep humans well and healthy, but doing this comes with a surprisingly large environmental footprint. Globally, healthcare systems are responsible for nearly 5% of carbon emissions, driven by energy‑intensive hospitals, medical waste, and millions of patient and staff journeys every day.
Digital health technologies, like telehealth, remote monitoring, and electronic medical records, are often promoted as part of the solution to lowering the environmental impact of healthcare. Our recent review of the current literature asked a simple but important question: how do health technologies impact the environment?
What we looked at
In 2025, we conducted a rapid review of studies published in the previous year, that examined the environmental impacts of health technologies. Studies were included if they reported quantifiable environmental outcomes (for example, CO₂ emissions or energy use) linked to health technologies, and were excluded if they discussed sustainability in purely conceptual terms or without environmental measures. In total, we found fourteen studies, primarily from high‑income countries, and most focused on carbon emissions related to patient or clinician travel.
The good news: fewer car trips lower emissions
Most studies showed that telehealth and virtual care reduced carbon emissions by cutting down on travel, particularly patient travel. Virtual appointments in areas like cardiology, dermatology, cancer care, and rural medicine often resulted in:
- fewer kilometres driven by patients,
- less fuel burned, and
- lower carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.
In rural and remote settings, where patients may be required to travel hundreds of kilometres for care, the environmental benefits were especially clear.
A key gap in the evidence though, was how simplistically car travel was treated. Most studies assumed that patients and clinicians would have driven a conventional petrol or diesel car to an appointment, without accounting for real‑world variation. Very few considered whether people lived in cities or regional areas, had access to public transport, walked or cycled, or used electric or hybrid vehicles. None of the studies reviewed examined how travel patterns might differ by income, disability, or urban design. As a result, emission reductions linked to avoided travel were often based on broad averages rather than actual behaviour, which may overestimate benefits in some settings and underestimate them in others.
The bad news: digital health also has environmental costs
The environmental benefits of digital health become more complicated once you look beyond travel. A small number of studies showed that not all health technologies had environmental savings. For example:
- Electronic medical records can increase energy use through the need for servers, data storage, and hardware.
- Telehealth relies on devices at both ends made from rare metals, which come with environmental costs from mining and manufacturing.
- Digital infrastructure consumes electricity and water, particularly for cooling data centres.
- Electronic waste is an increasingly serious global problem.
One study even found that switching from paper records to electronic systems increased overall emissions once energy use and equipment disposal were included.
Access to digital health, and its potential environmental benefits, is unequal
Over half of the studies we reviewed were conducted in the United States. Very few came from low or middle income countries, even though these regions often face greater climate vulnerability, weaker health infrastructure, and lower access to digital technologies. Digital health may offer environmental and health benefits, but these can only be realised if it is accessible, affordable, and appropriate to local contexts. Without equal access to, and uptake of these technologies, there is a risk of widening existing inequalities in both health and environmental outcomes.
So, can digital health technologies help planetary health?
Digital health technologies can reduce emissions, particularly by reducing unnecessary travel. But their overall environmental impact depends on how technologies are designed, how they are implemented, how people use them, and whether organisations actively plan for sustainability.
Right now, research focuses too narrowly on travel savings and not enough on the whole system and broader environmental impacts. To truly align healthcare with planetary health goals, future research and policy needs to involve interdisciplinary collaboration between health, environmental science, and technology experts to understand the whole system.
Healthcare cannot be separated from the planet it depends on. If digital health is going to be part of the climate solution, we need to design and study it with the broader impacts and benefits technology can have on the planet firmly in mind.
This rapid review was completed in 2025 by Dr Vaibhav Tyagi, Prof Melissa Baysari and Kirsten Jackson. The findings are in-press, and will be published in the 2025 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook.
Header image by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash