The role of open standards in catalysing knowledge transfer to deliver climate adaptive care

Abstract

As climate change threatens to destroy health gains, digital health provides infrastructure that is well-placed to offer patient-centred health insights. These insights are important to advance research to explore the intersection of climate and health. We present a proposal to leverage open data standards to more seamlessly collect, exchange, and use a combination of environmental and health data to assess climate-health risks to improve patient and population outcomes.

Fig. 1. WHO Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based and Testable Guidelines Approach for Climate-adaptive Care.

Evidence of the influence of climate and environment on health outcomes is health impacts (blue) generated by research generated from digital health platforms (yellow); WHO Guidelines are produced that follow climate-related clinical practice recommendations (green); localized guidelines are developed considering direct health impacts mediated by primary environmental impacts of climate change (red); and climate, environmental and health data resulting from digital health programs built on SMART guidelines inform further guideline development processes (purple); tertiary effects (upward-pointing arrows). Adapted from {Mehl, 2021} under Creative Commons V.4 licensing from Mehl G, et al..

Fig. 2. Climate-informed patient-centred care.

Taken from {Mehl, 2023} with written permission from author and adapted under Creative Commons License V.4. Patient-centred care is enabled for climate-adaptive care as a result of climate and environmental data enhancing Open Standards (yellow); efficiencies gained by modularizing software to allow developers to work with FHIR data (green); national architectures which provide specific and clear governance models for both health and climate data use (red); content including resulting care plans which can be transparently shared, evaluated and understood (blue). Adapted under Creative Commons license 4.0 from Mehl et al. A full-STAC remedy for global digital health transformation: open standards, technologies, architectures, and content. Oxford Open Digital Health. 1, 1–5 (2023).