For patients whose illnesses are shaped by what they eat, the right groceries can act a little like a prescription. A new analysis of Massachusetts' Medicaid program puts a number on that idea: people who received home-delivered, dietitian-designed meals landed in the hospital far less often than comparable patients who did not.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, tracked Medicaid members living with diet-sensitive conditions such as diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney disease and depression. Those enrolled in the meal program had 31 percent fewer hospitalizations and 20 percent fewer emergency-department visits than a matched group of patients who went without.
Nearly paying for itself
The financial picture was almost as striking as the health one. Per-person healthcare costs fell by an average of $3,433 over the roughly six months patients received meals — enough to offset 98 percent of what the program cost to run. Researchers at Tufts University's Food is Medicine Institute, working with UMass Chan Medical School, the Boston nonprofit Community Servings and several state health systems, drew on Medicaid records from 2020 to 2023 across eleven Massachusetts healthcare networks.
The meals themselves are not generic care packages. Each is fully prepared, delivered to the home and built by a registered dietitian around a patient's specific medical needs — part of a broader "food is medicine" approach that treats nutrition as clinical care rather than charity.
Massachusetts was the first state to offer such meals broadly through Medicaid, the insurance program that covers roughly 71 million lower-income and disabled Americans. At least a dozen states are now running their own pilots, and the new findings give them the first large, real-world evidence that the model works at scale.
"Our results show that food really is medicine," said senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist who directs the Food is Medicine Institute, pointing to what he called major implications for how insurers cover care. For patients, the payoff is simpler still: fewer trips to the emergency room, and more days spent well at home.