What challenges or gaps in care are you focused on?

Historically, hospital food is notorious for poor quality and often seen as a cost item with limited return on investment. Reflecting on our lessons learned with regards to Northwell’s food transformation efforts, we recognized there is great opportunity for healthcare leaders to be engaged and educated on the importance of food and nutrition on overall patient health outcomes, quality care, and experience.

What initiatives are you currently spearheading to improve health?

It has been a seven-year long process with many initiatives happening simultaneously.  A key initiative would be hiring great chefs; those with extensive hospitality industry backgrounds, and of stellar cooking skills. Through close partnership and collaboration with chefs and registered dieticians, we are making great strides in food quality, disease-specific diets, menu diversity, bedside education, and community outreach to assist with food insecurity.

What necessary collaborations/partnerships have you established within and/or outside of your organization in developing your initiatives?

Our team carefully selected the best partnerships with local vendors who understood the relationship we needed in order to improve our food and service within our healthcare system. We hand-selected partners who saw the vision and aligned with our core values. At the same time, aligning our leadership to get the full support from all food and nutrition managers, along with the hospital executives, proved crucial in understanding the great need for the change of culture and redirection of our focus on the food quality and the service. The dedicated engagement and full commitment to the vision by all hospital staff is vital to success of any of our initiatives.

What is your measurement criteria for success or what current measurable improvements have you realized from your food as medicine/nutrition-focused initiatives?

Northwell has improved performance for the system patient experience measure, “Quality of Food” by 74 percentile rank points within the past six years. As of 2024 YTD, the system “Quality of Food” performance is at the 83rd percentile, when compared nationally to peers via the Press Ganey national database. Nine Northwell’s adult hospitals (60%) rank in the top quartile, with eight hospitals (53%) achieving a rank of 90th percentile or higher. We listen very carefully to the ‘voice’ of our patients through real-time rounding, patient experience surveys and digital feedback mechanisms.  Lastly, we are also carefully examining our food costs due to current inflation concerns and are making concerted efforts to reduce food waste.

What gives you hope for the future in health care?

Our competitors locally and nationally have seen the tremendous food transformation at Northwell and are trying to learn from our successes. That is a very good sign that not only are we performing very well, but that we are continuously moving the needle forward when it comes to the quality of our healthcare systems. Northwell has awakened the other hospital systems nationwide with our spearheading innovation.