Duh...
To keep their chronically ill residents at home and out of hospitals or nursing homes, states are beginning to look at food-as-medicine models that deliver healthy, nutritious meals under doctors’ orders.
But there’s now a state that’s doing a lot more than looking.
California has launched a new, three-year, $6 million pilot program spearheaded by six local not-for-profit organizations, The New York Timesreported. A group of 1,000 Medi-Cal recipients who have Type 2 diabetes or heart failure will receive free, strategically nutritious meals under the new program. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program. Researchers will then compare that group to a larger population of Medi-Cal patients who didn’t receive the delivered meals, all with the goal of assessing whether the food-as-medicine approach does, indeed, reduce re-admission rates and slash health care costs.
“Food-as-medicine has intuitive appeal, and there is some limited evidence that management of diet can reduce complications such as readmissions,” Dan Mendelson, president of the Washington D.C.-based consulting firm Avalere Health, told Home Health Care News via email. “Health plans and governments are interested in expanding these programs—provided that they don’t add substantially to cost.”
Recent research has revealed that a lack of access to nutritious food often leads to higher readmissions rates. Home-delivered meals—both ones that are tailored to medical needs and meals that are not—have been found to curtail emergency department trips, inpatient admissions and the use of emergency transportation.
On a national level, there is currently “considerable experimentation” going on to gauge the food-as-medicine model’s effectiveness, Mendelson said. The Food Is Medicine Coalition, a national association of non-profits that supports nutrition-related public public, for example, has grown to include 27 member organizations scattered across more than states.
“Many states are starting to allow food as a benefit in Medicaid,” Mendelson said. “We expect to see these trends to continue—and to accelerate if food-as-medicine can prove positive medical outcomes.”