• Posted April 29, 2025

Telemedicine Cuts Down On Greenhouse Gases

Telemedicine isn’t only more convenient for patients, but could be helping save the planet, a new study says.

Telemedicine use in 2023 reduced monthly carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of more than 130,000 exhaust-spewing gas-powered vehicles, researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Managed Care.

This suggests that telemedicine could have a modest but noticeable impact on air quality and climate change, by decreasing the number of vehicles on the road for medical appointments, researchers said.

“As Congress debates whether to extend or modify pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities, our results provide important evidence for policymakers to consider, namely that telemedicine has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of U.S. health care delivery,” co-senior researcher Dr. John Mafi, an associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a news release.

The U.S. health system contributes about 9% of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, while transportation comprises about 29% of emissions, researchers said in background notes.

For this study, researchers analyzed data on health care utilization patterns for nearly 1.5 million telemedicine visits between April and June 2023. These included about 66,000 visits in rural areas.

The team estimated that between 741,000 and more than 1.3 million of these telemedicine appointments were substitutes for in-person visits.

If so, telemedicine would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by between 21 million and 47.6 million kilograms each month in the U.S., researchers said.

That translates to the emissions produced by 61,000 to 130,000 gas-powered vehicles, or recycling 1.8 million to 4 million trash bags, researchers said.

"The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” co-senior researcher Dr. Mark Fendrick said in a news release.

“Our findings suggest that the environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions,” said Fendrick, a professor of medicine and director of Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on telemedicine.

SOURCE: UCLA, news release, April 22, 2025