Two pathways to disrupted essential support
WHEN HEALTH DEPENDS ON ENERGY, POWER OUTAGES AND HIGH ENERGY COSTS ARE PUBLIC HEALTH.
Galvanista helps organizations identify where energy conditions create health risk and develop, implement, and evaluate interventions that address it.
Why energy resilience matters for health
Electricity supports healthcare across rural and urban communities through powering healthcare facilities, medical equipment, medication refrigeration, climate control, and essential healthcare functions. When electricity becomes unaffordable or unreliable, those supports can be disrupted, making energy affordability and reliability important healthcare considerations that impact the greater community as a whole
From energy disruption to potential healthcare consequences
How Galvanista works
We GRID IT with EcoDex
EcoDex is Galvanista’s analytical and decision-support framework for identifying and implementing energy-related healthcare interventions through targeting, project development, and supporting evaluation. It helps Galvanista identify risk, prioritize needs, develop interventions and implementation pathways, support projects as they move into action, and evaluate outcomes.
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Identify
Understand where energy conditions create health risk and where healthcare cost exposure may be concentrated.
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Prioritize
Determine which populations, places, and energy-health needs should receive attention first.
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Develop
Shape the intervention, funding pathway, delivery model, and partnerships needed to move forward.
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Implement
Support and coordinate implementation with healthcare, program, community, energy, and delivery partners.
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Evaluate
Assess what changed, for whom, and the healthcare and economic implications of the intervention.
Applying EcoDex
New Orleans brings together several conditions EcoDex is designed to examine: residents whose health depends on electricity, areas with high household energy burden, reliability challenges, healthcare infrastructure, and potential healthcare cost exposure. Galvanista is applying EcoDex here to understand where these conditions intersect and where intervention may be most useful.
The opportunity
Neighborhood Power Plan Opportunity Snapshot
The program already has a defined framework, funding, and customer participation pathway. The opportunity is to connect those resources more intentionally to health need.
Program framework
3 years
Initial framework for the distributed energy resource program.
Program funding
~$30M
Committed across customer incentives and program administration.
Customer pathway
Battery + solar-plus-storage
Eligible Entergy New Orleans customers can participate through qualifying systems.
Health opportunity
Eligibility + referral
A health eligibility and referral pathway could help connect medically vulnerable households with available resilience resources.
How EcoDex can be used
EcoDex can support the Neighborhood Power Plan by bringing health vulnerability, energy conditions, healthcare geography, and modeled healthcare cost exposure into a single decision-support view.
Patient population
Blue shading represents HHS emPOWER Medicare beneficiary counts, helping establish where larger numbers of electricity-dependent Medicare beneficiaries are located.
Healthcare geography
Hospitals, federally qualified health centers, other relevant facilities, populations, and service areas help establish where healthcare and medically vulnerable needs are concentrated.
Energy infrastructure
Transmission lines, substations, reliability conditions, service areas, and other relevant energy-system information help establish the infrastructure and electricity conditions affecting those areas.
Medically electricity-dependent population
2,698
Medicare beneficiaries1
Current HHS emPOWER beneficiaries with qualifying electricity-dependent medical equipment or device claims.
Affordability context
7,314 households
in 14 high-energy-burden census tracts2
Tracts at or above DOE's 6% high-energy-burden reference.
Reliability context
Median annual reliability exposure3
All events
2.00
interruptions / customer / year
586.4
minutes / customer / year
Without Major Event Days
1.40
interruptions / customer / year
153.6
minutes / customer / year
Healthcare spending exposure
$462K to $2.31M
Potential inpatient-equivalent healthcare spending from one modeled widespread outage4
1 HHS emPOWER public data for Medicare beneficiaries with qualifying electricity-dependent medical equipment or device claims.
2 U.S. Department of Energy household energy-burden data. The 7,314 figure represents estimated households within 14 tracts meeting the 6% tract-level reference, not an individual household classification.
3 U.S. Energy Information Administration Form EIA-861 reliability data, 2020-2024. Values are medians of annual SAIFI and SAIDI under All Events and Without Major Event Days reporting conditions. Major Event Days are days identified under reliability reporting rules as unusually severe outage conditions. The same metrics are shown under both conditions to distinguish overall outage exposure from conditions excluding Major Event Days. SAIFI values are rounded to two decimal places.
4 EcoDex modeled healthcare spending scenario analysis. Illustrative planning estimate, not observed outage-attributable healthcare spending.
Work With Galvanista
Galvanista works with organizations that want EcoDex applied to a program, service area, population, or energy-health question, as well as organizations that can contribute data, expertise, funding, program access, implementation capacity, referrals, or evaluation support.
Apply EcoDex
For organizations that want Galvanista to assess an existing or emerging program, population, service area, or energy-health opportunity.
Collaborate
For organizations that can contribute to the development, implementation, funding, research, or evaluation of energy-health interventions.