The study, from BridgeHead Software, details of which are being released at the Health Informatics Congress event in Birmingham this week, shows that only a quarter of hospitals surveyed had a specific CO2 reduction target.
According to the healthcare storage virtualisation specialist, a further 29% of respondents were unaware of a CO2 target, if it did exist.
The survey also asked respondents – healthcare IT professionals mainly from the UK and the US – what they were doing to reduce their organisations' IT carbon footprints. Just 16% said they monitored energy consumption across their IT infrastructures on an ongoing basis against pre-set targets. Less than 3% claimed to use a carbon-offset scheme.
John McCann, BridgeHead's director of marketing, said that, prior to the recession, 'green IT' was definitely en vogue.
"Yet the survey results suggest a shift in priorities, namely that green IT is not a primary focus for healthcare IT professionals at the moment", he said.
"Although reducing the carbon footprint from their IT infrastructures may not be a specific objective, any green benefits certainly seem a welcome by-product of other cost-saving activities, such as, for example, healthcare storage virtualisation (HSV)", he added.
McCann went on to say that, although HSV is best known for its technological benefits – simplifying data migration, enhancing content access and maximising storage resource usage – it also offers some green merit as a secondary benefit.
It does this, he explained, by helping to alleviate the burden of healthcare data being kept 'powered-on' on the primary store.
"In our survey, nearly 40% of respondents said they were employing server and/or storage virtualisation to minimise the number of physical servers in use and maximise the efficiency of their existing storage assets which, in turn, delays the need for hardware upgrades", he said.
This mindset, says McCann, is certainly a step in the right direction and many healthcare organisations are starting to adopt this approach.
"Our experience suggests the majority of healthcare data is rarely accessed and, therefore, many healthcare organisations are spending a lot of time, effort and money attempting to keep unnecessary data online, which requires not only the storage hardware itself but also vast power consumption", he said.
Longer term, McCann says he hopes to see a more pragmatic approach to managing data that will contribute to a reduced carbon footprint.
Infosecurity notes that the NHS' Carbon Reduction Strategy for England (CRS) mandates that the NHS must reduce its existing carbon footprint by at least 80% by 2050 to meet government CO2 targets.
To stay on-track for this target, the NHS must reduce carbon emissions by 10% by 2015, based on a 2007 baseline.