The healthcare industry has its own popular food trend: produce prescriptions.

Kaiser Permanente launched its Food Is Medicine Center for Excellence on April 11, an effort by the nonprofit healthcare provider to expand food and nutrition interventions within patient care.

The initiative will centralize Kaiser Permanente’s existing food-based programs, which aim to address “food and nutrition insecurity and the many diet-related, chronic diseases” that affect Kaiser Permanente’s patients, according to a press release. These services include medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, nutritional counseling, and other efforts to address diet-related diseases.

“Our vision is to ensure that our members can access, afford, and eat nutritious foods in times of need and beyond,” Nancy Gin, EVP and chief quality officer of The Permanente Federation, a leadership organization for all Permanente medical groups, said in a statement.

Kaiser Permanente’s food prescriptions study, which served as a pilot program for the center’s produce prescription initiatives, tested how access to nutritious foods affected weight loss. Participants were provided with dietitian-designed meal plans, recipes, and home-delivered groceries over a six-month period, averaging $110–$190 per week in value depending on household size, per the study’s website.

Keep reading.—LN

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National hospital operator Ascension said a “cyber security event” has disrupted some of its clinical operations, according to a Thursday news release.

Ascension, a St. Louis-based nonprofit and Catholic healthcare network, announced it had detected “unusual activity” on some of its systems on Wednesday, according to the release. In response, the company kicked off an investigation and remediation efforts—including turning to outside cybersecurity firm Mandiant for help, as well as notifying the “appropriate authorities,” per the release.

“Our care teams are trained for these kinds of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure patient care delivery continues to be safe and as minimally impacted as possible,” the release said. “We continue to assess the impact and duration of the disruption.”

Ascension operates 140 hospitals and includes thousands of affiliate providers and associates across more than a dozen states and Washington, DC, according to the system’s website. The release did not specify which clinical operations the cyberattack had impacted, or how.

Keep reading.—NB

On Fridays, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Robbie Freeman, VP of digital experience and chief nursing informatics officer at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. Freeman will be a panelist on May 15 at Healthcare Brew’s event Bench to Bedside & Beyond: The Future of Health Tech, which is taking place in New York City (and virtually). During the event, Freeman will discuss how the health system is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to improve patient care.

Freeman gave Healthcare Brew a preview of the work he’s doing with Mount Sinai and discussed some common misconceptions surrounding AI.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What does your job as VP and chief nursing informatics officer entail?

My role is to help us advance our technology capabilities around the digital experience, AI, and informatics. I lead our work around digital experience, around nursing informatics, and more recently, around our enterprise data and analytics. Those are the three teams I lead, and the common theme is around applying technology to improve experience, patient care quality, and safety.

Our nurse informaticists serve as translators between the clinical team members—our frontline nurses, doctors, and other members of the care team—and the technology teams. A lot of the work is focused on how we can improve quality, safety, and the patient experience.

Keep reading.—MA

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