Science
Our Research Focus
The American Heart Association’s Health Care by Food™ initiative aims to purposefully invest resources to address critical questions that face the field and lay the groundwork for definitive evidence to influence coverage decisions on food is medicine interventions by public and private payors. The initiative’s research is guided by expert volunteers.
Common Measures
Health Care by Food’s Health Equity and Common Measures Task Force has designed a set of common measures. These measures were designed to facilitate the comparison of data among our 20 funded pilot studies for combined evaluation of results from different studies. Shared metrics are vital for pooling data across studies and producing more generalizable insights to allow for more comparability between studies.
To improve fidelity for merging data sets and facilitating use of the common measures, an accompanying code book was designed and is available for use.
While these common measures were originally developed for the Association’s funded studies, we welcome their use in the broader food is medicine research community as adopting common measures across initiatives will lead to more consistent, comparable and actionable data. We also welcome feedback and conversation on these measures in the hope they may be useful for the field.
Health Care by Food held a webinar in July 2024 to discuss the common measures. Register to view the recording on demand.
Roadmap
A 2023 American Heart Association Presidential Advisory on Food Is Medicine serves as a roadmap for the research, advocacy, quality measurement, professional education and public awareness needed to promote widespread adoption and coverage of food is medicine interventions that improve health and are cost-effective. The advisory establishes that:
- Healthy, nutritious food may be a useful strategy in the health care setting to treat and prevent acute or chronic diseases.
- Food is medicine has the potential to improve health outcomes for millions of patients.
- A coordinated research approach is needed to more systematically and rigorously define how well food is medicine interventions prevent and treat disease compared to standard medical care.
- Research must be complemented by efforts in advocacy, quality improvement and education to fully incorporate food is medicine into the health care system.