Medically Tailored Meals Bibliography

Research and a clinical evidence base are a key component of Medically Tailored Meals. This research focuses less on general correlations between a nutritious diet or easy food access and good health, it focuses more on how specific interventions have an impact on specific clinical indications and/or health care costs. But both lines of inquiry are clearly related. Here we have collected key pieces of MTM-focused research.

Context & Overview:

Food Is Medicine Research Action Plan - Including both an overview of key research on Medically Tailored Meals impact and recommended priorities for future research, Aspen Institute (2022).

Food As Medicine Report (Center for Food As Medicine, 2021) and Guide to Resources on Programs.

Peer Reviewed Articles Cited in Food As Medicine Report (2021):

• “I Was Able to Eat What I Am Supposed to Eat”– Patient Reflections on a Medically-Tailored Meal Intervention: A Qualitative Analysis: BMC. 2020

• Association Between Receipt of a Medically Tailored Meal Program and Health Care Use: JAMA Internal Medicine. June 1, 2019

• Medically Tailored Meals as a Prescription for Treatment of Food Insecure Type 2 Diabetics: Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews. 2019

• Medically Tailored Meal Delivery for Diabetes Patients with Food Insecurity: a Randomized Cross-over Trial: Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2018

• Meal Delivery Programs Reduce The Use Of Costly Health Care In Dually Eligible Medicare And Medicaid Beneficiaries: Health Affairs. April 2018

• Food as Medicine: A Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of Home Delivered, Medically Tailored Meals (HDMTM) on Quality of Life (QoL) in Metastatic Lung and Non-colorectal GI Cancer Patients: Journal of Clinical Oncology. 2016

From the Food is Medicine Coalition:

2021 Summary of Food Is Medicine Coalition Research

Food is Medicine Coalition Research Papers. Includes:

• Community Servings: Association Between Receipt of a Medically Tailored Meal Program and Health Care Use

• Project Angel Heart: Small Intervention, Big Impact - Health Care Cost Reductions Related to Medically Tailored Nutrition

• MANNA: The Food is Medicine Model

• Community Servings: Meal Delivery Programs Reduce the Use of Costly Health Care in Dually Eligible Medicare and Medicaid Beneficiaries

• Project Open Hand: UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations Study

• MANNA: Examining Health Care Costs Among MANNA Clients and a Comparison Group

• Columbia Mailman School of Public Health - Research briefs

• Food as Medicine White Paper for Community Servings

Research Pages for Individual MTM Organizations:

• California Food is Medicine Coalition 

• God’s Love We Deliver 

• MANNA / MANNA Institute

• Community Servings partners

  • Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation

  • Massachusetts Food is Medicine State Plan 
    

Other MTM Clinical Research:

• Nourishing Seniors through Medically Tailored Meals, National Resource Center on Nutrition and Aging (August 2019)

• Home-Delivered Meals Post-Discharge from Heart Failure Hospitalization, and effects on 30-day readmissions. Circ. Heart Fail (August 2018)

• Interventions Addressing Food Insecurity in Health Care Settings: A Systematic Review Annals of Family Medicine (September 2019)

• SIREN Report on Food Insecurity Interventions in Health Care Settings (August 2020)

• Food is Medicine: Actions to integrate food and nutrition into healthcare BMJ (June 2020)

• See also Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network; Tufts Food is Medicine research library; S.I.R.E.N. (U San Francisco)
  

Other MTM Cost & Operations Research:

• Case Study of Meals on Wheels and Medicare Advantage Plan for delivering medically tailored meals (2021)

• Administration for Community Living Budget Justification Reports - impact of home-delivered meals on older adults’ health (note: not all of these will fall under the specific category of “medically tailored”)

• Commonwealth Fund Report studying return on investment for social determinants of health interventions 

• Children’s HealthWatch Cost of Hunger report for Massachusetts

• The Case for Insurance Reimbursement of Medically Tailored Meals under the Affordable Care Act Presentation, Harvard Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation

• Association between Receipt of Medically Tailored Meal Program and Health Care Use. Berkowitz et al. JAMA Internal Medicine (June 2019)

• Assessing the Capacity of Social Service Organizations to Respond to Referrals from Health Care Providers. Krueter et al. Health Affairs (February 2020)

• Programs Reduce the Use of Costly Health Care In Dually Eligible Medicare and And Medicaid Beneficiaries.Berkowitz et al. (April 2018)

Additional Information:

For additional information and research related to food-based health interventions beyond Medically Tailored Meals, check out our page on Increasing Program Impact.