Research into Making Healthcare Green with Cloud, Green IT, and Data Science to Reduce Healthcare Costs and Combat Climate Change

Abstract

Making healthcare energy efficient and green is an excellent way to help solve the Climate Crisis. The UN Climate Agreement on reducing carbon emissions reached in Paris during December, 2015, along with all the recent critical climate events, help raise awareness to the urgent need to reduce electricity use through efficiency. Green Healthcare, Green Computing, and Green IT (Information Technology) are all excellent ways to reduce electricity use and save money doing it. Globally, the healthcare sector is growing in importance and plays a key role in world economics. The healthcare sector makes heavy use of technology including social media. Technological advances have revolutionized the healthcare industry worldwide – from modern testing techniques to improved surgical equipment, remote health monitoring technologies with the help of modern digital equipment, etc. There are many online healthcare portals. The complexity of the healthcare industry helps account for the large environmental footprint. A big challenge facing the healthcare sector is how best to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of this very complex system. Efforts over the past few years to analyze and create highly efficient data centers presents an excellent opportunity for cost effective Green IT at hospitals. Given the complexity of the healthcare industry, there is a need for extensive use of data science, Big Data, and analytics as an ideal way to determine how green healthcare outcomes can be improved. Hospitals and healthcare in general can take significant steps in the green direction by combining big data analytics with cloud computing. This paper gives examples of how Data Science, Big Data, Analytics, and Cloud Technology can be used in healthcare to significantly improve a hospital’s IT Energy Efficiency along with information on the best ways to improve energy efficiency for healthcare in a cost effective manner.