Towards a Green Health Technology Assessment: embedding Life Cycle Assessment for sustainable choices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33393/grhta.2025.3399Keywords:
Environmental sustainability, Health Technology Assessment (HTA), HTA Core Model, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)Abstract
The healthcare sector significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. Among the various strategies available, exploring the integration of environmental sustainability into Health Technology Assessment (HTA) presents a potential avenue for addressing these impacts. The HTA Core Model, widely utilized by European HTA agencies, evaluates healthcare technologies across nine domains; however, environmental considerations remain peripheral and are primarily confined to certain safety-related aspects. This paper examines the potential role of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in complementing HTA to better address environmental impacts. LCA offers a systematic methodology to evaluate environmental effects across the full lifecycle of a product, from raw material extraction to disposal. Through the analysis of pharmaceuticals, telemedicine, and surgical practices, the study identifies critical environmental impacts at various lifecycle stages, illustrating how LCA could support more informed and sustainable decision-making in healthcare. These findings underscore the diverse environmental impacts associated with healthcare technologies and highlight the need for tailored strategies to mitigate them. This point of view emphasizes the importance of initiating discussions on developing a framework to incorporate environmental impacts into HTA systematically, promoting healthcare decisions that prioritize both human and environmental healths.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2025-01-22
Published 2025-02-14
