Digital Health and Climate Change: Critical Informatics for Change
Kate Fultz Hollis, Fleur Mougin, Lina F. SoualmiaSummary
To introduce the 2025 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook of Medical Informatics. The editors of the Yearbook present the contents of 13 sections, and IMIA working group papers and the keynote paper.
The editorial presents the 2025 IMIA Yearbook whose special theme is “Digital Health and Climate Change”. The section editors introduce the special topic, the survey papers and section best paper overviews. Changes in the Yearbook editorial board are also described.
The IMIA Yearbook 2025 provides different perspectives on current issues on “Digital Health and Climate Change”. Many sections present original work on this year’s theme, and all sections describe notable contributions from 2024 in the various medical informatics specialties covered by the Yearbook.
“Digital Health and Climate Change” is a major issue: while digital technologies have environmental costs, they also can drive environmentally sustainable innovation, and while digital tools can reduce the environmental footprint of the healthcare sector, particularly by reducing CO2 emissions through telemedicine, their technological development also has a negative impact on the planetary health.