Giving Compass' Take:

• Carolyn Crist reports that a study shows that meal deliveries, particularly tailored meal deliveries, reduced healthcare costs for seniors. 

• How can philanthropy help to ensure the continuation and expansion of meal delivery programs? Can existing programs shift to a tailored model to increase impact?

• Learn how some agencies are working to protect seniors. 

Ensuring that vulnerable elderly are well-fed could trim their healthcare costs, especially for emergency-room visits, U.S. researchers say.

Seniors in the Boston area who received meals at home through programs like Meals on Wheels had fewer emergency department visits and fewer hospital admissions than their peers who didn’t get the meals, leading to lower medical spending overall, researchers report in Health Affairs.

“We’ve known for a while that lack of access to nutritious food has important health consequences, but we haven’t always had a good sense that our interventions are actually effective,” said lead study author Dr. Seth Berkowitz, who was with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston when the study was conducted.

The study team focused on Commonwealth Care Alliance members with at least six months of enrollment in one of two meal delivery programs, and compared them to members who were similar but not participating in a meal program.

Of the meal recipients, 133 got meals that were medically-tailored for certain conditions, such as diabetes or a need for soft foods. Another 624 got untailored meals from the non-profit Meals on Wheels organization. More than 2,300 non-meal-recipients were in the comparison group.

The research team looked at the number and costs of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, use of emergency transportation, inpatient visits, outpatient visits and pharmacy use.

They found that people in the medically-tailored meal program had fewer emergency room visits and inpatient admissions and less emergency transportation use than the comparison group. Those in the nontailored meal program had fewer emergency visits and lower transportation use but about the same rate of inpatient admissions.

Read the full article about food delivery programs by Carolyn Crist at Reuters.