Telehealth can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cancer care, with research showing decentralized cancer care and telemedicine can cut emissions 33% compared to traditional in-person visits.
So this is a study where we were interested in looking at what is the emissions reduction when we actually convert cancer care from a lot of the in-person care that we know it to be to things like telemedicine where somebody gets video visits or even decentralized care, which is both that as well as kind of a local therapy, let's say at the, at the close to home clinic. Um when people can and we're interested in this because we know that us health care produces enough emissions to cause um human harms as colon cancer each year. And we wanted to really reduce the amount of those um emissions and downstream harms. And so, um one of the obvious ways to do this telehealth is the amounts of transportation it saves. So first, we looked at kind of what happened at data farmer prior to the pandemic when things were in person versus telehealth during the pandemic. Um When we kind of looked at that, we found about 80% reduction in the amount of emissions per visit um prior to the pandemic versus during the pandemic uh based on the admissions and then what we did was say, oh, we have all this data prior to the pandemic when everybody was getting in person care. So we looked kind of hypothetically at all the visits and said, we found the ones that could be done more local to home and we found the ones that could be done over telemedicine. And we kind of converted that we saw about a third of a reduction in the emissions. And then we took that data and kind of matched it to everybody in the US who had cancer over that period. And we found that there was about a 75 million kg decrease in the amount of CO2 that would have been produced by providing this um cancer care more locally and over telemedicine versus in person that only translated to a few number of lives saved in the end. Um just because it takes a lot of carbon to harm us. Um So it really implicates that for people who were maybe kind of in the middle ground about if they should use telehealth or not, if it's better for them for some things like they don't have to drive in, they save time, they save costs um or for other people where they might have some more health harms potentially from using telehealth. We kind of find it maybe tipping the scales a little bit for people where you're um really on the fence about, about using things like that. So, um it's just ways to really provide the same amount of and the same great care that we do at Dana Harbor. But do so in a way that's potentially better for the patient and also better for the environment.
