Applying Legal And Clinical Quality Standards To ‘Food Is Medicine’

By Erika Hanson, Rachel Landauer, Alissa Wassung, Maya Park, Cate Hensley, Kathryn Garfield. Originally published in Health Affairs Forefront on November 27, 2024.

Across the country, insurers are increasingly offering food- and nutrition-related benefits, including treatments that provide access to nutritious food through the health care system for patients with specific health conditions and social needs, commonly known as Food is Medicine (FIM). In recent years, the United States has experienced accelerating federal support for and state adoption of policies that integrate FIM into health care delivery and insurance coverage. This movement is due to several factors, including the US onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which stressed the high rates of diet-related chronic diseases and included response-package funding and policies that supported FIM programs; the accumulating number of peer-reviewed studies showing the health outcome, cost, and use benefits of specific FIM interventions; and increased attention at the federal level to the social determinants of health, poor nutrition, and health disparities.

As a natural consequence of this rapid evolution, regulators, payers, and FIM providers have faced challenges in applying service definitions, credentialing providers (including a number of new entrants into the market), and appropriately pricing services across jurisdictions, giving way to wide variation in practices, service, and provider quality.

We argue that quality standardization is a logical next step for FIM. At a time when policy and practice is moving toward coverage of FIM as benefits in insurance programs, it is both feasible and reasonable for policy makers to articulate national FIM quality standards. What is more, we believe that such efforts should build on existing health care legal and clinical frameworks.

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