Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham has formally launched The Cooperative, an initiative building healthcarewide models to protect patients from extreme heat and poor air quality.
The health system unveiled the initiative Sept. 22 at The Cooperative’s first Innovation Forum. The event was held at Climate Week NYC as part of the National Academy of Medicine and New York Academy of Medicine’s Climate and Health Commons event.
The Cooperative is based at Mass General Brigham and brings together healthcare organizations, public health agencies, community groups and government partners. In its first phase, it will connect personalized clinical care to public health and community resources through programs the system already runs.
The initiative has operated since 2024. It helped add heat and air quality questions to Mass General Brigham’s 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment, in which 36% of respondents said they felt unwell at home because of heat. In May 2026, it added a heat vulnerability question to the system’s social risk factor screening questionnaire to identify at-risk patients across clinical areas. The effort will also draw on an AI tool developed with IBM that sends heat alerts to at-risk patients.
“Environmental threats are already affecting patients across the country,” said David Brown, MD, president of academic medical centers at Mass General Brigham, in a Sept. 22 news release. Dr. Brown said the goal is solutions that health systems nationwide can scale and adapt.
The Cooperative works at the institutional, local and national levels. It plans to publish operational guidance in a public roadmap and at future forums, and it will later expand to other climate-related harms, such as extreme weather and vector-borne diseases.
“No single organization can address these challenges alone,” said Renee Salas, MD, the initiative’s founding director and an emergency medicine physician at Mass General Brigham, in the release.
The Massachusetts General Hospital Fund and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation are funding the initiative.
