Purpose: Feeding America (FA) and Elevance Health Foundation partnered with the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition (GSCN) to conduct a mixed-methods assessment of a national Food is Medicine (FIM) initiative including 21 regional partnerships between Feeding America partner food banks and healthcare providers. An evaluation protocol was co-created with all partners to study changes in food and nutrition security, health-related outcomes, and factors influencing FIM program implementation, accounting for between-program heterogeneity.

Methods: A learning collaborative was used to support shared decision-making through a series of interactive virtual meetings with food banks and health care partners (e.g., group learning sessions with all 21 partnerships, 1:1 meetings between each partnership and GSCN/FA). Topics for collaboration included the development and administration of data collection tools, data sharing (i.e., program records, electronic health records – EHRs, claims data), and approaches to strengthening partnerships between food banks and healthcare organizations. Descriptive data for each partnership’s program (e.g., dose/duration, inclusion criteria) were captured through meeting notes and integrated into the study protocol.

Results: The result of this process was an initiative-wide study protocol to measure the impact of FIM programs on participant-reported outcomes (e.g., fruit/vegetable intake, quality of life), healthcare utilization (e.g., EHR, claims data), lived experiences (e.g., qualitative interviews), and barriers and facilitators to FIM program implementation. Site-specific evaluation plans were developed to integrate data collection procedures into each program’s workflow, develop data-sharing procedures, and add tailored survey/interview questions to support local evaluation goals. The heterogeneity of the partnerships’ programs, including program model (e.g., clinic-based food pantry, mobile food pantry), amount of food (e.g., one-time food box, biweekly food distribution), inclusion of nutrition education (e.g., group class, 1:1 dietitian visit), and referral to federal nutrition assistance programs, informed all aspects of protocol development.

Conclusions: This co-developed evaluation balances shared measures and heterogeneity across programs to understand FIM impacts on nutrition and health-related outcomes and implementation best practices. Given the global rise in FIM programs, this approach may be used to develop collaborative evaluations across many countries. Forthcoming results will advance the FIM field by illustrating the varying impacts of FIM across diverse programs and contexts.

Purpose: Food as Medicine is increasingly implemented to address the dual challenge of nutrition insecurity and chronic disease. Food as Medicine refers to integration of food-based nutrition interventions into healthcare to prevent and treat disease. Partnering with healthcare, food, and community-based organizations is critical for developing, implementing, and evaluating effective Food as Medicine interventions.

Methods: A community-university partnership was formed to develop, implement, and evaluate Recipe4Health, a Food as Medicine program in Alameda County, California. The partnership included healthcare organizations, an urban farm, community-based organizations, and academic institutions. Recipe4Health includes a Food Farmacy that provides 12 weekly home deliveries of produce with or without a Behavioral Pharmacy that offers personalized health coaching or 12 weekly group medical visits. The partnership has implemented the program in 5 Federally Qualified Health Centers to date and examined pre/post changes over 4 months in outcomes assessed by surveys (e.g., produce intake, physical activity, food insecurity). We also compared health outcomes (e.g., lipids, HbA1c) in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) between Recipe4Health patients and controls over 12 months. Control patients were identified using propensity score matching with patients from similar clinics that had not implemented Recipe4Health. We used linear mixed effects models with repeated measures, adjusting for baseline of each outcome.

Results: Study participants (n=5,286) were middle-aged (mean age 51.2 SD [13.9]) primarily women (68%), and from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds with 51% Latinx, 21% Black, and 8% Asian American/Pacific Islander. Based on pre/post surveys, Recipe4Health participants significantly increased their produce consumption (0.41 servings [0.11, 0.72], p=007) and physical activity (41.98 minutes/week [22.33, 61.63], p<.001). Recipe4Health participants also experienced statistically significant improvements in food insecurity with 59% reporting food insecurity at baseline and 48% reporting food security at follow-up (p<.001). Based on EHR data, Recipe4Health participants significantly decreased their non-HDL cholesterol (-17.1 [-26.9, -7.2], p<.001) and HbA1c (-0.37%, 95% CI [-0.65, -0.08]; p=0.01) compared to propensity score-matched controls at 12 months.

Conclusion: A community-university partners successfully developed, implemented, and evaluated Recipe4Health. Our partnership demonstrated that Recipe4Health improved outcomes related to chronic conditions among diverse patients in Federally Qualified Health Centers.

Purpose: Poor diet impacts one in five deaths globally, while over 40% of the global population can’t afford a healthy diet. Improving population eating patterns to align with national nutrition recommendations could facilitate a major reduction in global disease burden but need to consider personal resources. Given potential reach and scale of online technologies, web-based programs offer an ideal opportunity to ensure evidence-based nutrition information is widely accessible. The presentation covers the impact evaluation of the No Money No Time (NMNT) program, on online web-based resource targeted at people with time and financial constraints by providing evidence-based nutrition information and resources (e.g., recipes and blog articles) to support healthy eating. NMNT(https://nomoneynotime.com.au/) was developed in consultation with a young adult target audience

Methods: The Framework to Assess Impact of Translation research (FAIT) was used to evaluate the impact of NMNT using quantified metrics, an assessment of costs against monetized consequences, and narratives to describe the impact of NMNT. Data were gathered via online surveys, in-depth interviews, Google analytics and document analysis,

Results: Since its in 2020, the reach of NMNT was extensive with over 28K direct users and over 78K registered through the eating quiz, with an increase from 44K visitors in 2020 to over 125K in the first 4 months of 2023. There have been over 1.6M recipe views and over 22K blog views. Of the 238,445 who completed the health eating quiz offered through the website, there has been an increase of 2.3 points (SD 6.9) (range 0-73 points) in their healthy eating score, some of which can be attributed to the NMNT resource.

Conclusions: This impact assessment case example using NMNT illustrates how researchers can use evidence to demonstrate and report the impact and reach of web-based nutrition promotion programs. The application of FAIT demonstrated impact in terms of knowledge-gain, capacity-building, infrastructure, and reach, particularly in under-served and disadvantaged groups in the community. More needs to be done to obtain feedback from users on changes in behaviour as a consequence of NMNT, to fully capture the return on investment in web-based nutrition programs.