IU School of Medicine professor Titus Schleyer is leveraging his skills in biomedical informatics — a field that uses information science and technology to solve problems in health care, public health and biomedical research — to address climate change challenges.

Schleyer, a professor of biomedical informatics and a research scientist at the Center for Biomedical Informatics of the Regenstrief Institute, has founded the Climate, Health and Informatics Working Group at the American Medical Informatics Association. The group is focused on leveraging informatics to help health care mitigate and adapt to global warming.

“Most people are surprised when they hear that health care in the U.S. is responsible for about 8.5% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions,” Schleyer said. “There are significant opportunities for reducing health care’s greenhouse gas footprint.”

Those opportunities range from common solutions such as increasing energy efficiency, switching to alternative energy sources and reducing waste, to the less obvious, such as decreasing the number and lengths of trips patients have to make, using anesthetic gases with a lower climate impact or taking the climate effects of drugs into account.

“My favorite are instances in which we can improve patient health while doing something for the climate.” Schleyer said. “For instance, a patient with high cholesterol will benefit from eating red meat less frequently — and so will the climate. So the patient lowers his risk of heart disease, and we reduce natural resource consumption, which is good for the planet.

“First and foremost, we need data to understand and address global warming. And this is where informatics comes in. The discipline is all about data and algorithms.

“One of our key challenges is to connect environmental and climate to health data. We need to make those connections to understand the effects of air quality on respiratory and other diseases, how heat waves affect morbidity and mortality, and how changing insect habitat ranges affect people’s exposure to infectious disease,” Schleyer said.

Members of the working group come from all fields of health care, public health and informatics. Schleyer has also made contacts to IU’s strong resources for climate change, such as the Environmental Resilience Institute. 

“We had to get five interested AMIA members together to start a discussion group,” he said. “That was in July 2023. We now have over 50 members. The interest and engagement just have been phenomenal.”