TY - JOUR
T1 - Precision Ecologic Medicine
T2 - Tailoring Care to Mitigate Impacts of Climate Change
AU - DeVoe, Jennifer E.
AU - Huguet, Nathalie
AU - Likumahuwa-Ackman, Sonja
AU - Bazemore, Andrew
AU - Gold, Rachel
AU - Werner, Leah
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023/1/1
Y1 - 2023/1/1
N2 - As recent extreme weather events demonstrate, climate change presents unprecedented and increasing health risks, disproportionately so for disadvantaged communities in the U.S. already experiencing health disparities. As patients in these frontline communities live through extreme weather events, socioeconomic and health stressors are compounded; thus, their healthcare teams will need tools to provide precision ecologic medicine approaches to their care. Many primary care teams are taking actionable steps to bring community-level socioeconomic data (“community vital signs”) into electronic medical records, to facilitate tailoring care based on a given patient’s circumstances. This work can be extended to include environmental risk data, thus equipping healthcare teams with an awareness of clinical and community vital signs and making them better positioned to mitigate climate impacts on health. For example, if healthcare teams can easily identify patients who have multiple chronic conditions and live in an urban heat island, they can proactively arrange to “prescribe” an air conditioner, heat pump, and/or air purifier. Or, when a severe storm/heat event/poor air quality event is predicted, they can take preemptive steps to get help to patients at high medical and socioeconomic risk, rather than waiting for them to arrive in the emergency department. Advances in health information technologies now make it technically feasible to integrate a wealth of publicly-available community-level data into EMRs. Efforts to bring this contextual data into clinical settings must be accelerated to equip healthcare teams to provide precision ecologic medicine interventions to their patients.
AB - As recent extreme weather events demonstrate, climate change presents unprecedented and increasing health risks, disproportionately so for disadvantaged communities in the U.S. already experiencing health disparities. As patients in these frontline communities live through extreme weather events, socioeconomic and health stressors are compounded; thus, their healthcare teams will need tools to provide precision ecologic medicine approaches to their care. Many primary care teams are taking actionable steps to bring community-level socioeconomic data (“community vital signs”) into electronic medical records, to facilitate tailoring care based on a given patient’s circumstances. This work can be extended to include environmental risk data, thus equipping healthcare teams with an awareness of clinical and community vital signs and making them better positioned to mitigate climate impacts on health. For example, if healthcare teams can easily identify patients who have multiple chronic conditions and live in an urban heat island, they can proactively arrange to “prescribe” an air conditioner, heat pump, and/or air purifier. Or, when a severe storm/heat event/poor air quality event is predicted, they can take preemptive steps to get help to patients at high medical and socioeconomic risk, rather than waiting for them to arrive in the emergency department. Advances in health information technologies now make it technically feasible to integrate a wealth of publicly-available community-level data into EMRs. Efforts to bring this contextual data into clinical settings must be accelerated to equip healthcare teams to provide precision ecologic medicine interventions to their patients.
KW - climate change
KW - community vital signs
KW - health information technology
KW - precision medicine
KW - primary care
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85153540538&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85153540538&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/21501319231170585
DO - 10.1177/21501319231170585
M3 - Comment/debate
C2 - 37086151
AN - SCOPUS:85153540538
SN - 2150-1319
VL - 14
JO - Journal of Primary Care and Community Health
JF - Journal of Primary Care and Community Health
ER -