As climate change intensifies, healthcare systems will increasingly face unprecedented climatic emergencies surpassing assumptions underlying their emergency protocols. While conventional scenario-based preparedness and contingency planning will remain relevant for most events, they may falter in unexpected crises. In such cases, a threshold-based framework could become essential for hospital response and resilience. Emerging AI agent technology offers opportunities to develop systems that could drive this paradigm shift in hospital climate preparedness.

As healthcare systems are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by mounting demands for care and declining capacity, digitally enabled interventions are being adopted to relieve system pressure. To ensure digital healthcare interventions are appropriate and beneficial, co-design should be central to their development. Co-design approaches will be increasingly instrumental in shaping future digital medicine interventions to address the needs of populations and individuals, thereby reducing the risk of wasting resources on unwanted, inoperable, and ineffective interventions. There is a growing body of literature reporting how end-users have been involved in informing the development of digital healthcare interventions. However, there are consistent omissions and discrepancies in key details of the co-design process, as well as inconsistent terminology, contributing to a convoluted evidence base.

Incarcerated individuals suffer from significant inequity of access to health care, a reality that has been the subject of prior high court decisions. This case report highlights the use of a “virtual” telemedicine modality to improve the limited access to evidence-based care, specifically cardiac rehabilitation post myocardial infarction, among incarcerated individuals.