Abstract
Food insecurity is an invisible public health crisis. Everyday 40 million Americans including 8 million seniors struggle to know where they will find their next meal. Our project articulates the advantages of collaborating across disciplines, specifically how to use design to innovate for impact. We provide a cost-effective way to address food insecurity and deliver nutrient-rich food for malnourished seniors. We propose leveraging the existing technologies of electronic health records (EHRs), electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards and (electronic) food prescriptions, to design an integrated medical, social and public health solution, and, demonstrate that this approach can improve the access, availability, utilization, and sustainability of feeding systems; reduce disparities; and improve the health and well-being of communities. Our journey is simple. We document responses to two USDA food security questions at all key touchpoints with the healthcare system, including primary care providers and feeding programs and act on that information. We supplement this documentation to address the need of seniors by including questions regarding biting, chewing and swallowing constraints. And, we design navigation tools to assist seniors in accessing foods that meet nutrition and oral health needs; food pharmacies, congregate meal settings and delivered meals, using their electronic benefit transfer cards with our community collaborators. Finally, we use the power of machine learning to collect data from the three electronic sources to monitor utilization, adherence and health outcomes, and identify best practices to meet the growing needs of food insecure seniors, and scale them to broader communities
Presenters
Mary Mc BrideChair, Creative Enterprise Leadership International Graduate Program, Pratt Institute Denise C. Tahara
School of Health Sciences and Practice, New York Medical College Xue Bai
Assistant Professor, Advisor to the Chair for Curriculum and Instruction, Creative Enterprise Leadership, Pratt Institute, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Innovation, Impact, Food Insecurity, Community of Collaborators, Seniors
