The Alliance was honored to receive a grant from the American Heart Association as a recipient of their new Health Care by Food Initiative™ to look at the development and testing of a user-centered framework to address food insecurity and diet-sensitive health outcomes. Those programs are off to a great start! So far, 158 patients with hypertension who screened positive for food insecurity have been enrolled through referrals from UK HealthCare and Appalachia Regional Healthcare. Beginning in October 2024, participants will receive either Medically Tailored Meals or a Grocery Rx for 12 weeks as part of our innovative food is medicine initiative. To enhance our understanding of the program’s impact, the research team is conducting user experience surveys and interviews with both participants and providers, gathering valuable insights at every stage of the screening, referral, and enrollment process.

Our proposal addresses the key goals of Humana Foundation related to, “Effective and equitable interventions to increase access to healthy diets promoting physical & mental health benefits”. Our interdisciplinary team comprised of clinicians, researchers in public health, nutrition, mental health, and community partners will evaluate the effectiveness of a whole family nutrition security intervention to provide evidence supporting key policies on reimbursement of health-related social needs (HRSN) as a medically covered benefit. Our study team will use a user-centered approach to examine how to engage the whole family in the short-term, while creating a sustainable model for clinic and community partnerships to use in the long-term. Our proposal aims to answer the question “How can a food as medicine choice model with tailored dose improve health outcomes across the family?”. To answer this question, we are proposing a pragmatic randomized control trial (pRCT) using a 2X2 factorial design among Medicaid families, adults with children ages 5-18, with an adult diagnosed with either hypertension or Type 2 Diabetes (T2DM), child has a BMI categorized as obese or overweight, and report being food insecure. The pRCT will take place in Louisville, KY with UofL Health as the clinic provider, in an urban setting with a high percentage of adults reporting race/ethnicity as Black or African American. Our community partners are Dare to Care Food Bank as the medically tailored meal (MTM) provider, and Kroger Health/Soda Health as the grocery prescription provider (GP).