Environmental impacts of artificial intelligence in health care: considerations and recommendations

Abstract Purpose (stating the main purposes and research question) Anthropogenic resource use contributes to pollution, violent conflict over scarce resources, loss of biodiversity, and diminished quality of life for humans. Moreover, the “safe” amount of carbon dioxide—350 parts per million—has been exceeded. The health care industry is responsible for 4–5% of total world emissions,i which is similar to the global food sector.ii Health care carbon emissions come from health care infrastructures, supply chains and health care delivery. Increasingly, health care delivery is reliant on technologies which require the use of artificial intelligence to provide supportive care, such as triage algorithms, electronic patient records, and robotics.iii While these technological innovations have advanced health care significantly, they also contribute to the negative effects on the environment, among others, through carbon emissions. The environmental impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care—in particular—are understudied. This research seeks to fill this gap. Methods Our team ran an exploratory search in Scopus and PubMed to identify studies that integrate environmental sustainability, artificial intelligence, and health. Results Our research initially yielded 735 studies. 77 of these studies focused on an environmental concern of a health technology or AI-application in a health care setting, but most of the articles in this subset addressed lowering energy consumption of a specific technology, such as a sensor or monitoring technology. Conclusions While there have been studies looking at AI in health care; sustainability in AI; and sustainability in health care, little attention has been paid to the interface between all three. i Karliner, J., Slotterback, S., Boyd, R., Ashby, B., September. ii Pichler, P. P., Jaccard, I. S., Weisz, U., & Weisz, H. 2019 International Comparison of Health Care Carbon Footprints, Environmental Research Letters 14, no. 6: 064004. iii Khaliq, Abdul, Ali Waqas, Qasim Ali Nisar, Shahbaz Haider, and Zunaina Asghar. 2022. Application of AI and robotics in hospitality sector: A resource gain and resource loss perspective. Technology in Society 68: 101807.