Healthcare-related carbon footprinting-lower impact of a coronary stenting compared to a coronary surgery pathway.

Healthcare is a major generator of greenhouse gases, so consideration of this contribution to climate change needs to be quantified in ways that can inform models of care. Given the availability of activity-based financial data, environmentally-extended input-output (EEIO) analysis can be employed to calculate systemic carbon footprints for healthcare activities, allowing comparison of different patient care pathways. We thus quantified and compared the carbon footprint of two common care pathways for patients with stable coronary artery disease, with similar clinical outcomes: coronary stenting and coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG).