With rapid environmental change causing new health threats, it’s increasingly important for physicians to understand their patients’ environmental exposures and how those might interact with preexisting health conditions or other socio-economic factors impacting patient health.

In a new publication,  Michele Barry, Director of the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health and Peter Rabinowitz, Director of One Health Research at the University of Washington, urge physicians to assess a patient’s environmental exposures when gathering information about their health history.

“As we take care of patients, it’s becoming more and more important to understand what environmental threats those patients are experiencing and to put that together with their other vulnerabilities,” said Rabinowitz.

Doing so would improve patient care and could also help identify emerging health threats to a larger population, including impacts from environmentally-driven diseases, pollution, extreme heat, natural disasters, and more.

“I’m incredibly excited about this idea of the environmental determinants of health,” said Barry. “I think incorporating environmental factors affecting patients into an electronic record can help the physician really make better decisions about the patient.”

Learn more in this video and read the publication here.