Integrating Food and Nutrition into Clinical Care: Building the Evidence on Medically Tailored Meals Programs

The integration of nutrition and health through "food is medicine" strategies is of rapidly growing interest to healthcare system, payers, patients and policymakers. Medically tailored meals are fully prepared, nutritionally customized, and generally home-delivered healthy meals for individuals living with advanced and costly diet-sensitive conditions, such as diabetes, heart failure, end-stage renal disease, HIV and cancer.

In recent years, growing evidence has supported the benefits of medically tailored meals on reducing hospitalizations and emergency department admissions and lowering healthcare costs. Medically tailored meal interventions represent promising new strategies for improving the outcomes of patients with diet-related chronic disease.

We are at a critical time to make policy advancements to fully integrate food and nutrition into healthcare and the policy opportunities are unprecedented. This session reviews the evidence of medically tailored meals on improving patients' health outcomes, especially for patients with cancer and discuss the policy implications and opportunities for integrating food and nutrition into healthcare.

CPE Level: Level 1 (basic knowledge/experience)
CPEU: 1.5

Performance Indicators

• 13.2.7 Develops recipes and menus for therapeutic diets in order to achieve nutritional goals and requirements.
• 12.1.3 Collaborates with community partners and stakeholders in promoting health and disease prevention.
• 6.2.3 Analyzes and interprets data to form valid conclusions and to make recommendations.

Learning Objectives

• Describe the current state of the evidence and the impact of medically tailored meals on the outcomes of patients with diet-related conditions.
• Determine the compounded consequences of malnutrition in vulnerable patients with cancer, using lung cancer as an example.
• Identify strategies to integrate both food and nutrition into oncology care as well as evidence and research into policies.

Moderator

• Colleen Spees

Speakers

• Susan Daugherty
• Katie Garfield
• Fang Fang Zhang