It’s now up to health systems to play a significant role in solving our food problems.
Access to healthy foods is further restricted by food deserts, neighborhoods without grocery stores, and food swamps, neighborhoods saturated with fast food.
Acknowledging food insecurity’s outsized role in driving poor nutrition and chronic disease necessitates prioritizing healthy food access for all in our response to our worsening food insecurity crisis.
ADVERTISEMENT.Increasingly, we understand that trauma influences our food and our health.
Health systems are well poised to play a strategic part in fixing our food problems due to their proximity to communities, central responsibility in treating chronic disease, the inclusion of mental health and participation in value-based payment models that incentivize addressing patients’ health-related social needs such as food.
Masshealth, the Medicaid insurance product for low-income individuals in Massachusetts, has created one of the first programs to allow health systems to partner with social service organizations and provide nutritional interventions – i.e. healthy food – on their dollar with its 149 million dollar Flexible Services Program.
Health systems ready to incorporate nutritional interventions can reference the Food is Medicine pyramid, created by Food is Medicine MA, which provides a helpful schema of evidence-based programs.
Nutritious food referrals, which provide vouchers for free or discounted nutrient-dense food, have been shown to improve fruit and vegetable intake, improve diabetic control and improve Body Mass Index.
Some may say it is not in scope for health systems to provide food for their patients.
Health systems are already increasingly harnessing available resources to tackle food insecurity for their communities.
A trauma-informed food is medicine approach that has the power to transform our disease-oriented system into a health system; it’s time we fully embrace it.