A customized meal program is helping Philadelphians manage chronic illnesses, and it may be expanded for even more people

While in the hospital this fall, recovering from a stroke and a heart attack, Ida Johnson-Anderson worried about how she would get meals once she was home.

Johnson-Anderson has diabetes, and the dietary restrictions she needs to follow in order to stay healthy only became more crucial to maintain after her illness. She also has vision problems, and, like many Philadelphia seniors with health issues, preparing nutritious food on her own can be difficult.

“It’s not always easy to have food available that doesn’t take long to prepare,” she said.

But before she went home, Johnson-Anderson connected with MANNA, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides free, tailored meals to accommodate participants’ specific medical needs. Every week since, she has received to her doorstep a delivery of low-sodium, low-calorie meals.

“I am really appreciative of MANNA for how they put forth special effort in balancing the meals,” she said.

Recipients of MANNA’s medically customized meals — sent to about 5,000 clients in 2022 — say the program is a lifeline. It also helps to keep them healthy.

A 2013 study conducted by the nonprofit found that clients who received its meals and nutrition counseling spent 31% less on health care a month. Patients were also half as likely to enter the hospital, and if they did need to be hospitalized, their stays were shorter and they were more likely to be sent home instead of moving to a long-term care or rehab facility.

Now, state health officials are planning to ask federal authorities to help cover some of the costs of medically tailored meal programs like MANNA in an effort to expand similar efforts around the state.

Medicaid, the publicly-funded health-care program for people on lower incomes, historically only covered medical care.

But in recent years, the program has allowed states to apply for waivers that would help cover expenses for food, housing, and job opportunities, sometimes called social determinants of health because they are widely recognized as impacting a person’s overall health. Medicaid covers some of MANNA’s costs in the Philadelphia region, but state officials hope that a waiver could help the nonprofit and others like it serve even more patients with Medicaid funds.

Val Arkoosh, the secretary of the state Department of Human Services, hopes the federal government will allow the state to put more resources toward such programs to reach more people who could benefit from nutrition counseling and medically designed meals.

“It’ll give us a lot more flexibility to build out programs that are more holistic and look more at the whole person, rather than just traditional healthcare,” Arkoosh said during a recent visit to MANNA, where she spoke with staff and representatives from area health systems who work with the organization.

In 2015, MANNA began collaborating with local insurers to cover prescription meals for Medicaid recipients with diabetes, a service described at the time as “pharmacy for your prescription diet” by MANNA CEO Sue Daugherty. Previously, the organization had relied entirely on donations to cover such meals.

Insurers who spoke with Arkoosh at MANNA’s event said patients who received medically tailored meals also benefited from nutrition counseling and help with shopping and cooking — initiatives that allowed patients to make their own meals and learn more about how to adhere to their prescription diets.

“Every day, people are prescribed these complex diets. It’s treatment, just like you would be prescribed physical therapy, and without MANNA, our clients would have no access to them,” Daugherty said.

MANNA clients say the program has helped them maintain a quality of life they wouldn’t be able to without the meals. They report the meals have helped them gain weight after a long illness, or maintain the energy to exercise and manage chronic conditions.

Johnson-Anderson said she’s received food from other meal programs before, but prefers MANNA’s program because the meals are “the kind of food that I eat and enjoy.”

She mostly gets plant-based meals, supplemented with chicken and fish from time to time. (Sometimes, she said, she adds a little garlic powder or cayenne pepper.)

Like other patients, Johnson-Anderson said she hopes the state will expand similar programs to more Pennsylvanians.

“I think if more people ate this way, it would be healthier for them, regardless of your health condition,” she said.