Wellness West is increasing access to food through partnership with Instacart
Wellness West has partnered with Instacart to provide its eligible
members with a $79 a month stipend to receive healthy
food delivered by Instacart. PHOTO PROVIDED BY WELLNESS WEST.
Wellness West has partnered with Instacart to provide access to healthy food for its members. The “Food Connections” program offers a monthly grocery stipend of $79 to eligible members of Wellness West. Those groceries will be delivered through Instacart.
Wellness West is a collaborative of healthcare providers located on the West side of the city. It includes Rush Hospital, Cook County Hospital, Sinai Hospital, Humboldt Park Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital, as well as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) located on the West side. There are forty providers in the network that are looking at how to reduce health disparities and health inequities in the community, with a significant concentration of Diabetes, Hypertension, Substance Abuse, Severe Mental Health Disorders and Adverse Childhood Experiences. It services ten zip codes on the West Side.
Wellness West is investing in a care model that is centered around using community health workers within the healthcare provider settings to provide supportive services to address disease management and care coordination, as well as addressing social needs and accessing care for behavioral health needs.
Misty Drake, Executive Director of Wellness West, said the partnership came about because Wellness West recognized that the medical model was not enough to improve health outcomes. Medical treatment and intervention, along with social drivers of health contribute equally to health outcomes.
“Our focus was really to look at investing close to $5.2 million in addressing health related social needs so that we give people a chance to have the best outcome, recognizing that healthcare alone won’t solve the problem, that we have to address social needs as well,” Drake said.
In screening their patients for social drivers of health, Wellness West found that 82 percent of their patients had at least one social driver of health need, for example housing, food insecurity or paying utility bills. Drake said that 35 percent of Wellness West’s patients struggled with food insecurity. Wellness West wanted to make sure that they partnered with an institution that created opportunities, as opposed to barriers, for the patients as well as the community.
Wellness West members can use their benefit, combined with other food benefit programs, to purchase fresh or frozen produce. The program is accessible to the eligible members for twelve months. Food Connections enables Wellness West to address food insecurity for the patients, as well as continue to support the economic development in the community. It is doing this by including hyperlocal grocery stores that have remained in the community. It is Wellness West’s way of re-investing dollars back into those grocery stores that have employed people in the neighborhood and remained in the neighborhood, when others have left. The aim is to ensure the dollars that are being invested in the Food Connections program goes to hyperlocal grocery stores.
“We really want to also partner with Instacart to get these independent grocery store vendors on the platform, as well, so that our constituents can use their benefit at those grocery stores,” Drake said, adding that the community is patronizing the hyperlocal grocery stores.
Drake is encouraging city leaders to think through how to increase food access to disadvantaged communities on the South and West sides and to invest in these communities. Food Connections is part of a broader strategy by Wellness West to stabilize food access and have an impact on patients that have Hypertension and Diabetes.
For more information about Wellness West, visit www.wellnesswest.org.
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