Healthcare Partnerships

For children living in households experiencing low income, higher rates of food insecurity, diet related disease and the lack of access to affordable healthy food can cause immediate and long term health challenges: 

• Children and adolescents experiencing food insecurity are more likely to have overall worse general health. ( Thomas, M. M. C., Miller, D. P., & Morrissey, T. W. (2019).  Food Insecurity and Child Health.  Available at:  https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/144/4/e20190397/38475/Food-Insecurity-and-Child-Health ; Hartline-Grafton, H., Hassink, S.G. (2020). Food Insecurity and Health: Practices and Policies to Address Food Insecurity among Children.  Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acap.2020.07.006 ) 

• Food insecurity in early childhood is associated with behavioral problems, anemia, and asthma at rates higher than those found among children who are food secure. Craig Gundersen & James P. Ziliak, Food Insecurity and Health Outcomes, 34 HEALTH AFFAIRS 1830 (2015), https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0645    

• Food insecurity and malnutrition in childhood impacts health outcomes and presents an increased risk for disease in adulthood.   (Victora, C. G. V., Adair, L., Fall, C., Hallal, P. C., Martorell, R., Richter, L., & Sachdev, H. S. (2008). Maternal and child undernutrition: consequences for adult health and human capital. Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61692-4/fulltext) 

• 

American Academy of Pediatrics and The Food Research & Action Center. (2021). Screen and Intervene: A Toolkit for Pediatricians to Address Food Insecurity. Available at: https://frac.org/aaptoolkit  

Challenges in meeting social and economic needs can lead to poor health outcomes, driving up health care costs and contributing to disparities. Given this impact, Medicaid programs are increasingly focused on addressing social determinants of health and health equity across the Medicaid population.  

• The Medicaid system is instrumental in providing health coverage for millions of children from low income households.  It presents a tremendous opportunity for integrating food access in healthcare delivery.   

Informed by a comprehensive landscape analysis and learning from pilot projects, No Kid Hungry’s current and future health strategies work centers on reaching kids and families at risk of hunger by focusing on three Medicaid health systems: (1) Managed Care Organizations; (2) Networks of School-Based Health Centers; and (3) State-Level Medicaid Managed Care Contract Procurement and Clinical Quality Improvement Strategies. 

Healthy Families Produce Rx is an innovative food access program for Medicaid enrollees, developed in partnership with Aetna Better Health of Louisiana, Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, Vouchers for Veggies, and LSU Ag Center.  With funding from the USDA’s Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Grant Program (GusNIP) the program will provide eligible families in 6 rural Louisiana parishes with $40 per month to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables at select local farmers markets and grocery retailers.  The goal of the program is to improve dietary health and food security for families in these communities who are disproportionately impacted by poor nutrition and related health outcomes. 

• Learn more  

Nutrition in Housing, a partnership with UnitedHealthcare that focuses on the sustainable integration of local programs that increase access to healthy food into existing services and facilities within the housing community serving families. The vision for this project is healthier, food-secure communities where residents can access affordable quality nutrition with choice, confidence and dignity. 

In partnership with the School-Based Health Alliance (SBHA), we are addressing access to healthy food as a social determinant of health with a learning network of school-based health centers.  The School-Based Health Center Learning Network (SBHCN) is a new food security initiative at the intersection of school environments and healthcare systems. Through an investment of nearly $400,000, 16 school-based health centers will implement community-driven food security solutions in their health center over an 11-month period (February – December 2022). SBHCN members will participate in monthly sessions to learn from each other and other experts in this work. SBHCLN seeks to achieve three goals: 

• Create or expand a local health center model that will identify food insecure students and connect them and their families to healthy food resource(s) and nutrition education; 

• Evaluate the model to understand the impact on (1) Student health outcomes, (2) Student food security, and (3) Student fruit and vegetable consumption; and 

• Develop promising practices for integration of food security models in school-based health center workflows.   

A list of awardees can be found here.  

Rural Clinic and Community Food Access Innovations Cohort  

This learning cohort is part of a pilot effort to test emerging strategies that leverage the potential of health care settings and systems to expand access to food and to nutrition programs for families. The ultimate goal of this learning community is to provide tested clinical-community food access interventions that are locally sustainable and that can be leveraged in other rural areas to address food needs of families before hunger becomes a crisis. These partnerships are being supported with a two-year grant (Jan 2021-December 2022) from NKH, and are each engaged in a community-centered approach to increasing access to food through produce RX and voucher programs in cooperation with local health clinics.  

Learn more cohort projects here.   

Synergy Health Tech  

NKH supported the launch of Synergy Health Technologies mobile grocery app in a family affordable housing community to enable residents to receive healthy food delivery and Cooking Matters nutrition education.  In the next phase of this project, we hope to gain more understanding of how the grocery delivery program, alongside using SNAP benefits online, impacts food security, diet quality and health-related quality of life for participants.   

Learn more Attached report 

Feed to Heal  

Cambridge Health Alliance’s “Feed to Heal” project is an initiative initially created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to connect quarantining food insecure patients with free, contactless food delivery. Seeing the potential for this referral model beyond quarantine, Feed to Heal got to work building out a technology-based system that deepens collaborations between healthcare systems and community food organizations with the goal of connecting patients, providers, health care systems, and food pantries. 

Learn more about Feed to Heal’s successes connecting families with meals and other food supports in the Case Study below.

Healthcare settings have increasingly become venues where food insecurity and other social determinants of health needs are identified.  However, addressing patients’ social needs in a consistent and sustainable way has proved challenging.  Patients experiencing food insecurity may be referred to federal nutrition programs or other local food access programs (such as a local food pantry).  A variety of referral systems, food resources and funding mechanisms have emerged to meet patient food needs.  Some existing models include:  

• Screen and Intervene  

• Produce Rx  

The Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign (NKH) is addressing access to healthy food as a social determinant of health by providing support to rural produce prescription programs. Produce prescription interventions have been popular as a means for addressing nutrition insecurity. Unfortunately, most of these interventions have been piloted in urban areas, thus the collective learning captured in resources meant to help communities adopt and scale these practices largely leave out key considerations that make the application of such models useful in rural areas. 

NKH grantees will integrate lessons learned from established produce prescription programs to build capacity and sustainability for rural communities. Grounded in the belief that produce prescription programs should be uniquely tailored to meet the specific needs of each community, NKH partnered with Vouchers 4 Veggies to research and develop a toolkit focused on implementing programs in rural areas. By sharing strategies and lessons learned from produce prescription programs operating in rural areas across the country, this toolkit identifies specific ways to utilize community strengths and assets to address the unique challenges often faced by produce prescription program operators in rural communities.

Through this investment of nearly $500,000, 10 rural produce prescription operators will implement programs utilizing the toolkit and access to a learning cohort over an 18-month period.  Goals of the learning cohort include:

• Addressing the key challenges that established rural produce Rx programs report facing in community-based capacity and funding
• Strengthening and scaling rural clinical-community partnerships’ capacity to connect families with food and nutrition programs
• Helping rural produce Rx programs increase food resources available to families
• Expanding the reach of established rural produce Rx programs via effective practices
• Helping rural produce Rx programs to develop local strategies for project sustainability

A list of the grantee organizations is included below: