Boston Medical Center prescribed electricity — rooftop solar pays patients' bills

Dr. Anna Goldman kept hearing that her patients couldn't afford the electricity their medical care depended on — hospital beds, breathing-assistance machines, wheelchair charging, refrigeration. One patient's home hospital bed used so much power the utility was moving to shut it off. BMC doctors wrote nearly 1,700 letters to utility companies in a year asking them to keep patients' gas or electricity running.

Goldman and Bob Biggio, the hospital's chief sustainability officer, went a step further: rows of 519 solar panels on the roof of a Boston Medical Center office building. The hospital uses half the energy they generate; the rest goes to 80 low-income patients with chronic and complex medical needs as a credit of about $50 a month on their utility bills.

Biggio has mapped nearly $11 million of additional solar — parking-lot canopies and other campus surfaces — that could extend credits to ten times as many patients, doable as long as federal solar assistance continues. Goldman frames it as the same logic as the hospital's patient vegetable garden: producing the things health outcomes depend on.

Energy insecurity is a medical risk — respiratory problems, mental distress and lost sleep track with unaffordable bills.

The hospital already owned the roof; the marginal cost of the credits was panels it wanted anyway for sustainability.

Doctor's letters could stop shutoffs but not the bills themselves — the credits attack the cause, not the symptom.

Framing power as part of the mission let a real estate project double as a clinical intervention.

A hospital's real estate is a clinical asset. Social determinants of health can be served from the roof, the garden, or any other space the institution already owns.

BMC is scoping almost $11 million in additional campus solar — including parking-lot canopies — that would multiply the credits tenfold. A Biden-administration health official called connecting those patients to bill-cutting clean energy 'really groundbreaking', and patient Kiki Polk discovered her doctors had 'that much pull'.