Environmental Impacts of Digital Services for Health and Wellbeing in the Home (EIDS)

England’s National Health Service (NHS) aims to be the world’s first net-zero health service. Meanwhile, digitalisation is transforming healthcare provision.

Digitalisation in health services (also known as eHealth) has potential to offer benefits in terms of sustainability, especially by reducing the need for patients and staff to travel to appointments.

However, there are also negative impacts associated with increased production, use and disposal of electronic devices, and there are energy impacts of storing and transmitting large amounts of data.

At present, there is little evidence on any of these impacts. This makes it hard for healthcare providers to build sustainability into the design of their digital services.

Our research involved working closely with NHS partners to understand how virtual appointments are changing their working practices, and how this might have knock-on effects on environmental outcomes.

The research explored changes to travel by patients and staff, use of NHS estates and facilities, and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Specialists in Life Cycle Analysis evaluated the impacts of these changes on a range of environmental outcomes, including carbon emissions.

This work formed part of a wider project that aimed to understand environmental impacts of a range of digital services in people’s homes. Other work within the project focused on technologies to help older people with independent living.

We are committed to doing our research in a sustainable way – view our Sustainable Research Plan (PDF).

This project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and started in September 2021. It was led by the University of Sussex, and also involved the University of Manchester, Imperial College London, University College London, and our partner organisations Orbit, Apello and Greener NHS.