The Human Journey of Food Is Medicine
While Health Care by Food™ continues to build the evidence base for food is medicine and advocates for changes in payment policy, the real and substantive barriers to human behavior change must be resolved before healthy food prescriptions can become widely adopted medical interventions.
Importantly, we recognize that individual food consumption is tied to:
- personal identity through cultural heritage,
- social norms and circumstances, and
- individual preferences.
HCXF chartered a Lived Experience Patient Advisory Board to understand the real-world priorities, voices and perspectives of communities that HCXF aims to impact, and to engage the people closest to the issues in developing solutions.
This group is tasked with placing the patient experience at the center of HCXF for ongoing insight and feedback to inform successful and sustainable food is medicine interventions.
What is Lived Experience?
Lived Experience comprises the insights and knowledge gained by individuals through their direct, first-hand involvement in everyday life, rather than through assumptions and constructs from other people, research or media.
It's critical to the success of Health Care by Food's mission to understand the lived experience of patients, not only in the context of a food is medicine intervention, but also in their personal experience with food and its meaning in their lives.
Capturing the human perspective is essential to build effective Food Is Medicine solutions
The Lived Experience Patient Advisory Board is exploring issues of behavior change, nutrition literacy, healthy food access and health care system capabilities while making space available for emerging priorities.
Success requires deep insight and meaningful engagement with the core human-centered issues that prevent behavior change.
The challenge of shifting food consumption behaviors at scale requires coordinated efforts from interwoven stakeholders that only a systemic effort could bring about for a systemic change.
The patient food is medicine journey
