Business
DispatchHealth and Instacart Partner to Tackle Food Insecurity through Healthcare
Companies join forces to empower DispatchHealth's in-home healthcare professionals with tools that help patients take action to address nutritional needs as
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[{"type":"text","content":"Companies join forces to empower DispatchHealth's in-home healthcare professionals with tools that help patients take action to address nutritional needs as part of their overall health and wellness. \nDENVER, Jan. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- DispatchHealth and Instacart (NASDAQ: CART), the leading grocery technology company in North America, are teaming up to confront one of healthcare's most pressing challenges: ensuring patients have access to nutritious foods. Using Instacart Health technology, DispatchHealth's in-home providers can now prescribe food interventions as easily as they do traditional medications. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in the ongoing battle against the substantial impact of food insecurity on healthcare costs. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates food insecurity adds a staggering annual expenditure of nearly $52 billion.\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n\"Nutrition access is fundamental to maintaining and improving health,\" said Sarah Mastrorocco of Instacart Health.\"Our patients' well-being is closely tied to their environment, and we witness firsthand how social determinants like nutritional accessibility affect their overall health. We are literally in the kitchen with our patients and not many provider groups can get to that level of granularity,\" said DispatchHealth Chief Medical Officer Dr. Phil Mitchell. \"Our collaboration with Instacart empowers us to bridge these gaps and bring about tangible improvements in our patients' lives.\"\nDispatchHealth is uniquely positioned to assess patients' complete health needs. Recognized as the nation's most comprehensive provider of in-home medical care, DispatchHealth offers a variety of medical treatments to patients of all ages—from managing everyday health hiccups and post-hospital recovery support, to providing complex care that would typically require a hospital stay.\nInstacart Health leverages Instacart's platform, products, and partnerships to increase access to nutritious foods, inspire healthy choices, and scale food as medicine programs across the country. The program empowers DispatchHealth's medical professionals to allocate digital, category-specific food stipends to patients using Fresh Funds, offer patients medically tailored shopping lists through customized Virtual Storefronts, and send fo...