Phase Health Joins TEPRI Member Collaborative

Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI) is excited to announce Phase Health as our newest supporting member.

Phase Health was founded by two members of the University of Virginia Health system, Jeffrey Keller, Chief Innovation Officer, and Amy Salerno, Director of Community Health and Well-Being. Phase Health’s mission is to drive improved health outcomes of individuals through collaboration and partnerships across the healthcare and energy industries.

Jeffrey Keller, founder of Phase Health and UVA’s Chief Innovation Officer, shares these thoughts about the mission alignment of Phase Health and TEPRI:

Phase Health is very excited to join the membership of progressive organizations that are working to understand and remedy the human and social costs of energy poverty. TEPRI is a pioneer and national thought leader in the most human aspects of resource constraints and tradeoffs, and its work has shone a light on a critical social dynamic. We believe that energy poverty is one aspect of an interrelated network of needs that citizens increasingly struggle to balance. Access to healthcare is another. We look forward to working with TEPRI and its members to flesh out the interface between the two with the goal of improving lives.

Dana Harmon, Executive Director of TEPRI, is also excited about the partnership. She says:

We are honored to have Phase Health join our member network. The energy and health nexus has become increasingly important in our work, and Phase Health brings a new level of expertise and impact opportunity to our mission to inspire lasting energy solutions for low-income communities. We look forward to our partnership and welcome the Phase Health team to our network.

Many individuals and families face difficult choices in household spending in order to maintain access to basic services, including residential energy and healthcare, for themselves and their family members. The utility sector in the United States has invested significantly to create a deeply integrated metering infrastructure that allows for improved grid management, performance, and transparency. The data sets that are used in routine grid operation also hold potential insights into individuals at disproportionate risk for adverse health outcomes. A significant portion of healthcare encounters are the avoidable result of the worsening of chronic conditions or acute episodes.

By leveraging large, existing data sets describing underlying clinical conditions in parallel with lifestyle factors, Phase Health works with individuals, their physicians, and utility partners to help pinpoint and mitigate health risk and avoid dangerous and expensive encounters with the healthcare system.