Lawrenceville trustee Kevin Volpp ’85 P’24 is a Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
Food as Medicine
Kevin Volpp ’85 P’24 will lead Health Care by Food, a $250 million research and advocacy program.
Kevin Volpp ’85 P’24 was tapped as the Scientific Leader of a new national, 10-year, $250 million research and advocacy program called Health Care by Food, or HCFX. The initiative is designed to find cost-effective approaches to improving health through greater access to healthy food for patients with chronic conditions, who lack enough food, or have unhealthy diets.
Coordinated by the American Heart Association with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and other funders, HCXF involves more than 100 researchers and members of 25 community-based organizations and food-related companies across the country. Volpp, the director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, is an internationally renowned expert in the field of behavioral economics.
“There is growing recognition of the impact of social determinants of health and health behaviors among health systems and health plans,” says Volpp, the Mark V. Pauly President’s Distinguished Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School. “Part of the […] initiative’s goals will be to design program implementation in such a way so as to minimize incremental effort for the health system in referring patients with nutrition insecurity and chronic conditions, as appropriate, to food is medicine programs. As more and better evidence is developed it will become easier to know to which programs to refer individuals to help them improve their health as cost effectively as possible.”
There is growing recognition of the impact of social determinants of health and health behaviors among health systems and health plans.
The idea for what became the HCXF research initiative was first publicly announced at the September 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Subsequently, the Association’s Journal Circulation published “Food Is Medicine: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association,” by a team headed by Volpp. The paper outlined the blueprint for a national program to develop evidence to inform interventions to drive nutrition-related sensitivities and solutions deeper into the daily operations of the national health system.
— Condensed from a report by Hoag Levins/Penn Today