Goals

1) All health care providers on a patient’s care team are knowledgeable about the role that food and nutrition play in prevention, management, and treatment of diet-related acute and chronic diseases; screen patients for food insecurity or, as appropriate, malnutrition; and feel empowered to respond quickly and effectively to a patient’s nutrition needs.

2) There are a number of high-quality, sustainably funded medically tailored food and nutrition services, ranging from a medically tailored meal to a produce prescription, available to patients who reside in any community across the Commonwealth.

3) All health care providers and community-based food and nutrition organizations have access to and use bidirectional platforms that allow providers to know whether patients have connected to referrals in the community, what services they receive, and whether the receipt of services has an impact on patient health and/or well-being.

4) The term “health care reform” encompasses and explicitly supports nutrition-sensitive health care systems for the benefit of patients, providers, payers, and the broader community.

5) The leaders of our health care and food systems come together to pursue a coordinated, transformative change at these systems’ nexus that will resonate more broadly in each arena.

Over 200 Members Representing over 100 Organizations

Food is Medicine Massachusetts [FIMMA] is a multi-stakeholder coalition that materialized from the Massachusetts Food is Medicine State Plan initiative which harnessed diverse expertise across the food and health care systems in the Commonwealth in a collective effort to enhance the role of nutrition in health care to effectively address rising rates of chronic illnesses while controlling health care costs.