Mass General Brigham launches The Cooperative to advance health resilience in a changing environment
The initiative is building a healthcare-wide response to improve patient outcomes in the face of environmental threats like heat and poor air quality
Mass General Brigham today announced the launch of The Cooperative, an initiative developing holistic, integrated models that harness a healthcare-wide approach to strengthen patient resilience to environmental threats, beginning with extreme heat and poor air quality. The Cooperative’s inaugural Innovation Forum is taking place today at the National Academy of Medicine and New York Academy of Medicine's Climate and Health Commons event at Climate Week NYC.
Based at Mass General Brigham, The Cooperative brings together healthcare organizations, public health agencies, community-based organizations, government partners, and other stakeholders to develop practical, evidence-informed healthcare models to safeguard health and strengthen patient resilience in a changing environment. Patient-level interventions center on the needs of those most vulnerable, while integrating with existing population-level approaches. The first phase of the initiative connects personalized clinical care to public health and community resources to improve patient outcomes, working through the existing capabilities and programs across the healthcare system.
“Environmental threats are already affecting patients across the country,” said David F. M. Brown, MD, President of Academic Medical Centers at Mass General Brigham. “The Cooperative is designed to bring together experts and organizations across disciplines and sectors to develop practical healthcare solutions that improve patient outcomes and can be scaled and adapted by healthcare systems nationwide.”
Since its founding in 2024, The Cooperative has collaborated with teams across Mass General Brigham to build the foundation for developing and testing innovative healthcare models. Last year, The Cooperative partnered with the Community Health team to incorporate questions into Mass General Brigham’s 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment to better understand, for the first time, how residents are experiencing the health effects of heat and poor air quality. Among the findings, 36% of respondents reported feeling unwell at home due to heat.
In May 2026, The Cooperative partnered with the Health Equity team to add a heat vulnerability question to Mass General Brigham’s systemwide Social Risk Factor screening questionnaire, helping identify patients at greatest risk from heat across all clinical care areas. This sets the foundation for a healthcare-wide response to increasingly protect patients from the combined risks of heat and air quality, harnessing system capabilities in new ways and leveraging existing innovations, including an AI tool developed with IBM that delivers heat alerts to at-risk patients.
The Cooperative is working at three levels—institutional, local, and national—to identify effective interventions, co-create new approaches, and harness opportunities for broader implementation. This collaborative model supports shared learning and contributes to the development of operational guidance, which will be publicly shared through a Roadmap and at future Innovation Forum events. This approach is intended to help accelerate the co-creation and adoption of equitable, climate-informed healthcare strategies in communities facing the universal challenges of heat and poor air quality. Over time, The Cooperative will expand its focus to address additional climate-related health harms, such as extreme weather and vector-borne diseases.
This inaugural Innovation Forum, “Unlocking Healthcare's Potential for Integrated Heat & Air Quality Solutions: A Cooperative Innovation Forum,” marks the formal launch of The Cooperative. It kicks off an ongoing series focused on collaborative problem-solving, elevating successful models, and sharing lessons learned. The event will bring together members of The Cooperative’s National Strategic Advisory Board, national and global leaders with deep-rooted experience across healthcare, government, community-based organizations, and other disciplines. Together, participants will explore opportunities for coordinated action and innovative, patient-centered approaches to protect those most vulnerable to heat and poor air quality.
“No single organization can address these challenges alone,” said Renee Salas, MD, MPH, MS, The Cooperative’s founding director and emergency medicine physician at Mass General Brigham. “By taking an all-of-healthcare approach, The Cooperative is working to accelerate the adoption of solutions to scale health resilience in a changing environment—especially for those most at risk. We are developing the response that I have longed to have for my patients—one that starts to treat the root causes of illness to shift us from reactive treatment to proactive care.”
The Cooperative has been generously supported by funding from the Massachusetts General Hospital Fund and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Media contact
Serena Bronda
Director, External Communications
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About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.