Neighborhood Health Center Food Prescription Program

Neighborhood Health Center (NHC) is WNY’s oldest and largest federally qualified health center with six locations.  NHC offers wellness and nutrition support to patients including a produce prescription program at 2 locations.  This program is in partnership with Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP) where patients receive a voucher for free produce from a NHC dietician and redeem it at a MAP mobile market.  MAP runs the Growing Green Mobile Market and provides a weekly mobile produce market for patients at one of the NHC clinic locations.  Patients can receive a voucher for free produce from the dietician at NHC and use it at the mobile market.  However, the mobile market is not able to serve all the NHS locations or reach patients who cannot attend the market.  Thus, NHC is working with FreshFix to deliver food directly to patients’ homes over 6 weeks.  Given that there are no other home-delivered food prescription programs in our area, and few nationwide (despite potential for Medicaid reimbursement for delivery), this pilot presents a great opportunity to understand how delivery may improve program usage.  It is also a unique opportunity since NHC also has a mobile market program to understand the barriers and facilitators to patients using both programs.  This knowledge can help us to understand how to improve usage of food prescription programs to positively impact nutrition security and diet of vulnerable patients.  In the long run, improving these programs can have a significant impact on health outcomes, health care usage and health care expenditures.