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Overview
In Texas, a produce prescription program helps pregnant women buy healthy food while evaluating how health plans can leverage nutrition as part of care.
For patients managing conditions where nutrition plays a critical role in health outcomes, from diabetes to high-risk pregnancies, healthy food can be as important as any medication or doctor’s appointment. But knowing what to eat isn’t enough when many patients simply can’t afford to buy the foods they need to meet their health care goals.
That leaves health providers with few ways to help patients follow those recommendations. As a result, one of the most important drivers of health often remains outside the care patients receive.
Doctors, health systems, and organizations that manage health plans are looking for new ways to improve outcomes and lower costs. One avenue they’re exploring is subsidizing the cost of healthy food as part of a comprehensive care plan that includes traditional medical care. In Texas, About Fresh and its partners are testing this approach.
Bringing Nutrition Into Care
In Texas, About Fresh, Community Health Choice, and UTHealth Houston Center for Healthy Communities are exploring how produce prescriptions can improve patients’ health and what it takes to make programs like this part of routine care. They’re also evaluating how program design can increase use of produce prescription benefits. The program focuses on women with high-risk pregnancies, where good nutrition can make a meaningful difference for both mothers and babies. Community Health Choice, which manages a health plan for Medicaid members, is funding a portion of the grocery benefit.
The technology that underpins this program is Fresh Connect, About Fresh’s produce prescription platform. Through the program, eligible participants receive $100 each month starting early in pregnancy for up to 12 months on a prepaid debit card they can use at grocery stores where they already shop. Families can choose foods that fit their household needs, cultural preferences, and daily routines, making it easier to buy fresh produce and other healthy foods. Text message reminders help participants use their benefits and make the most of the program.
Building the Case for a New Approach
The collaboration with Community Health Choice is an important assessment of whether programs like this can gain long-term support from health plans.
Behind the scenes, Fresh Connect helps partners understand how the benefit is being used over time. Combined with the evaluation led by UTHealth Houston Center for Healthy Communities, that information can provide evidence on how food benefits affect health outcomes and health care costs.
Hundreds of patients have enrolled in the program, with more than 90% activating their benefits and 92% of those participants going on to use them. While longer-term health and cost outcomes are still being evaluated, these early signals suggest that, when healthy food is integrated into care and designed to be easy for patients to access, people engage with it.
Informing the Future of Care
While the program focuses on women with high-risk pregnancies, the lessons could apply far beyond maternal health.
About Fresh and the health providers, health plans, researchers, and community partners behind the Texas program are testing whether healthy food benefits can improve outcomes and become a sustainable part of care. The results could help more health plans cover nutrition support as part of care, shaping how health systems support families for years to come.
