Discharge planning plays a crucial role in patients’ recovery, influenced by various factors. To support this transition, NYU Langone is focusing on one key ingredient: nutrition.
The New York City-based health system launched its “Food as Medicine” program in 2022 at its Brooklyn campus, expanding to Manhattan in February 2024. The program integrates medically tailored meal deliveries into patients’ discharge planning through a self-funded partnership with meal provider God’s Love We Deliver.
The program provides customized meals to patients following discharge based on their medical conditions and nutritional needs.
Renee Gross, the health system’s senior director of social work, told Becker’s the program aims to address broader issues of access to nutritious food for patients who may face barriers after discharge. For example, a patient may lack a strong support system prior to hospitalization, or their hospital stay may affect their ability to care for themselves once they return home.
“There’s a lot of education done during the hospital stay that may not carry over once a patient returns to their community, and that’s where our awareness of what God’s Love We Deliver brings to the table — both literally and figuratively — matters, because it’s medically tailored to the patient’s needs,” Ms. Gross said. “They have renal diets and low-fat, low-salt, which help our heart failure patients, our diabetic patients, and overall improve the health and well-being of our patients that qualify.”
Erich Anderer, MD, chief of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn and a board member for God’s Love We Deliver, views the program as “holistic health maintenance” to help keep patients out of the hospital and potentially reduce readmission rates.
Regarding medically tailored meals, research has supported this potential. For example, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2022 found that national implementation of medically tailored meal programs could potentially be associated with significant numbers of averted hospitalizations and annual net cost savings from an insurer perspective.
“The program initially started in Brooklyn with subsets of patients that qualified,” Dr. Anderer said. “And in Brooklyn, we care for a lot of patients that may not have access to resources, may not have access to the capacity even to have three nutritious meals a day.
“In fact, for a lot of patients in this program, and a lot of patients that God’s Love serves, God’s Love is their sole source of food. So this is a really important initiative for holistic health maintenance, and we’re proud to be able to offer this to our patients.”
To be eligible for the 30-day program, patients must have at least one of three qualifying diagnoses — heart failure, COPD or pneumonia — along with a valid home address, documented social need or food insecurity, and no food allergies that the program cannot accommodate.
NYU Langone uses Epic and a custom IT build that identifies those who meet the program’s criteria. “It automatically generates a list based on what’s documented in the patients’ charts,” said Jasmine Bar, administrative fellow of hospital operations. Then, social workers are notified, who can interview patients at the hospital and connect them to the program.
If patients do not meet the diagnostic criteria for the program, they may be offered a different food program based on preference.
Ms. Bar said while data is still being collected, she has already seen successes as far as having an infrastructure in place to document at various points why a patient might decide to continue with the program until completion — or drop off. She said this has led to important insights into what a patient’s needs are, as well as what their caregivers’ and their families’ needs are.
“For example, when the social worker conducts the interview of patients who are eligible for the program and the patient says, ‘No, I don’t want this,’ we actually have them document the exact reason that they don’t want it,” she said. “That can be insight that could then fuel future interventions to target populations for whom this might not be an appropriate intervention.”
God’s Love also provides a weekly report showing the number of patients who were referred to them by NYU Langone — who accepted when God’s Love contacted them to set up the initial intake. God’s Love also provides information on who completed the program, and if they did not finish, the reasons they did not. This reporting can provide crucial information, according to Ms. Gross. For example, the patient may have left off an allergy during the initial intake process.
“Collecting this data — in addition to looking at readmission outcomes — has been very insightful in understanding why patients could or couldn’t engage, how we can better message this intervention to patients, and what future interventions should look like as well,” Ms. Bar said.
