Home-delivered meals might reduce ER visits, study suggests

Delivering meals to vulnerable sick people might be a simple way to cut back on emergency room visits and hospitalizations, reining in some of the costliest kinds of medical care, according to a new Health Affairs study. Low-income seniors or disabled younger people who received home-delivered meals — particularly meals designed by a dietitian for that person's specific medical needs — had fewer emergency visits and lower medical spending than a similar group of people who did not receive meal deliveries. “This is an excellent study that really points out, again, how important it is to get food to people,” said Craig Gundersen, a professor of agricultural strategy at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the study. “Some people's response is that will drive up the federal budget, which on one hand it does. But on the other hand, we have to look at the cost savings associated with this ... [through] non-trivial reductions in health-care costs in our country.”