CMJ4 - Innovative Funding & Design to Implement Food Pharmacies in Clinics Across a City to Address Hypertension & Diabetes

Session Description: This session will explore The Food For Health Collective San Francisco’s regional approach to addressing community and individual patient non-clinical factors of health needs. This inter-organizational partnership of public and nonprofit organizations is dedicated to advancing nutrition security and reducing health challenges through the integration of food and nutrition interventions in primary care. The Collective's development, innovative funding model, and process of building partnerships across public and private health systems, nonprofits, food businesses, and other community stakeholders has a lasting positive effect for patients, their families, staff and the larger community. This session will explore how the Collective’s structure, processes and funding model build robust clinical-community partnerships, which promotes culture and systems change in healthcare to embrace food insecurity as a healthcare issue and drives our policy change agenda to embed these services into our state’s Medicaid program.
We will discuss how the Collective supports clinics to operationalize food programming into their workflows, staffing models, and within their electronic medical records using the food pharmacy program as an example. Food pharmacy is a clinic-based food intervention designed to support patients in managing chronic conditions, improving their overall health and wellbeing, and building trusting relationships with their healthcare providers. Food Pharmacies take place on-site at clinics, typically weekly, and prioritize serving Black, Latinx, and low-income patients managing chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes. Visits to Food Pharmacy include high quality groceries; adverse experience cooking and nutrition education; group health education with clinicians; and cooking equipment.