Medically Tailored Meals: Improve Healthcare Outcomes & Lower Cost

Medically Tailored Meals Improve Healthcare Outcomes

Lower Cost

Our Mission Community Servings is a nonprofit organization with a 30-year history of providing medically tailored, nutritious, scratch-made meals to chronically and critically ill individuals and their families.

About Community Servings

Community Servings was founded in 1990 to provide home-delivered meals to 30 individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Today we provide medically tailored meals to 2,300 people annually.

2,300 people served 71% of our clients have multiple diagnoses 94% of our clients live in poverty

Our Meals

Medically Tailored Meals Evidence-base nutritional intervention Tailored to an individual’s specific medical condition(s) Delivered to an individual’s home Prepared under the supervision of a registered dietitian nutritionist to meet the nutritional needs of individuals living with critical and chronic illnesses.

Examples of illnesses include: HIV, cardiac disease, diabetes mellitus, end-stage renal disease, cancer

Medically Tailored Meals 15 MEAL SELECTIONS (choose up to 3)

15 medical diets tailored to nutritional and medical needs.

Meals are scratchmade using whole, fresh ingredients Processed foods limited to snacks and milk.

Medically Tailored Meals

Medically tailored meals recipients can be some of the highest need, highest cost patients to treat.

Food insecurity is associated with worse health and higher healthcare use and cost—and medically tailored meals are emerging as a key food insecurity intervention.

Our Research

Research Studies We have led three clinical research studies* on the health and economic benefits of Medically Tailored Meals.

STUDY 1 STUDY 2 STUDY 3

These studies found that MTM: § Improves diet quality § Reduces health care utilization § Reduces costs for individuals with

complex chronic illnesses and poverty.

*With Dr. Seth Berkowitz, formerly of Mass.

General Hospital and now at UNC Medical School

Health Affairs Study Published in the journal Health Affairs in April 2018

THE STUDY Examined the impact of home-delivered meals on 133 adults who were dually eligible for Medicaid and Medicare.

MAIN FINDING Demonstrated an average monthly net reduction (factoring in the cost of meals) of 16% in medical costs for individuals receiving MTMs, vs. a matched control group of 1,002 people.

Supported by a grant from the AARP Foundation

16% Net Reduction

In average monthly healthcare costs for patient who received Community Servings' home-delivered, medically tailored meals

Diabetes Study Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in November 2018

THE STUDY Using the crossover method, the study tested whether the receipt of MTM improved dietary quality for food-insecure diabetic patients MAIN FINDING Study subjects showed improvements in nearly all measures of the Health Eating Index

Supported by grants from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation and BNY Mellon

Healthy Eating Index For individuals receiving MTMs

JAMA Study Published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine in April 2019

THE STUDY Researchers looked at data from 807 medically tailored meal recipients— the largest study of its kind to date.

MAIN FINDING Participation in a medically tailored meals program was associated with fewer hospital admissions and nursing home admissions—and less overall medical spending.

The study estimated a 16.4 percent difference in average monthly medical costs ($3,838 versus $4,591) for individuals receiving meals from Community Servings.

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Evidence for Action program.

16%

Monthly medical costs For individuals receiving MTMs

Hospital and nursing home admissions For individuals receiving MTMs

Our Goals

Our Goals This study and the two that preceded it should galvanize the attention of funders and policy makers.

PROGRESS DEPENDS ON Better understanding of the range and type of effects of MTM programs on health and healthcare utilization Further research that seeks to learn for whom MTM programs are most useful and what length of service is required.

Healthcare finance models that allow for MTM programs as covered benefits in circumstances where they have been shown to be of value