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- Posted June 4, 2026
Home-Delivered Medical Meals Reduce ER Visits, Save Money
Providing home-delivered, medically tailored meals to people with chronic health conditions lowers their risk of landing in a hospital, a new study says.
Medicaid patients had fewer hospitalizations and ER visits while receiving meals tailored to their specific medical conditions, which included diabetes, heart disease and depression, researchers reported June 2 in the journal Nature Medicine.
The subsequent savings offset nearly the entire cost of the meal program and actually saved money among people with certain chronic health problems, researchers found.
"Our results show that food really is medicine, with major clinical and policy implications for health-insurance coverage of medically tailored meals to impact diet-related diseases and healthcare costs,” senior researcher Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian said in a news release. He's the director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University in Boston.
At least a dozen states are rolling out medically tailored meals in pilot projects throughout Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that serves 71 million Americans who are disabled or income-qualified, researchers said in background notes.
For this study, researchers analyzed data from a pilot project implemented across 11 healthcare systems in Massachusetts, comparing outcomes for nearly 1,900 Medicaid members who received meals to the same number who did not.
Participants received 10 meals per week – a mix of breakfasts, lunches and dinners – as well as some snacks.
All meals were prepared and delivered by a Boston-based nonprofit called Community Servings, based on an initial consultation with a nutritionist to tailor the food to the patients’ medical needs.
Results showed that those who got the meals had 31% fewer hospitalizations and 20% fewer ER visits.
Overall per-person healthcare costs for people receiving meals declined by about $3,400 – enough to offset 98% of the meal program’s cost, researchers said.
In fact, Medicaid actually saved money on people with some chronic conditions – heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, depression – even after accounting for the cost of the meals, results showed.
"These findings show that medically tailored meals can be both clinically effective and economically sustainable within Medicaid," lead researcher Kurt Hager said in the release. He's an assistant professor of population and quantitative health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester.
Mozaffarian said it’s rare to find anything that both improves health and saves money.
"It should be a no-brainer to extend similar programs to patients in other states and covered by other health insurance programs, such as Medicare and employer-based insurance," he said.
More information
The Food Is Medicine Coalition has more on medically tailored meals.
SOURCE: Tufts University, news release, June 2, 2026
