Researchers developed an easy-to-use screening tool to improve families’ access to federal nutrition programs.

Researchers from the Possibilities Project and Clinical Futures at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed, implemented and successfully tested a nutrition screener to improve access to healthy resources for families eligible for federal food benefits. The findings were published this week in the journal Neurology. Family Medicine Annual Report.

Many low-income families rely on federally funded programs like the Special Nutrition Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for nutrition, which have been linked to improved health outcomes and reduced health care costs. Yet complicated application and enrollment processes prevent many eligible families from accessing the benefits of these programs.

“Previous research at CHOP has shown that 50 percent of people who are eligible for services like WIC may not actually use them,” said George Dalembert, MD, associate director of CHOP’s Center for Health Equity and co-author of the study.

CHOP’s Possibilities Project aims to design innovative strategies and implement new ideas to better serve patients. In this study, to help eligible families understand the system, researchers designed and tested a standardized process to link families to WIC and SNAP during a pediatric primary care visit. The nutrition screener was a tablet-based survey that asked eligible families if they were interested in assistance applying for WIC or SNAP or if they wanted information about local food banks.

Caregivers who sought help applying for WIC or SNAP received a call within a week with targeted assistance enrolling in benefits, and information was printed during the office visit and linked to their child’s patient portal.

In the first month of the pilot in November 2022, 433 families completed the screener (74% in person and 26% via the patient portal) and 73 families (17%) requested nutrition resources. This included 17 families who requested information about local food banks and 56 families who requested assistance with applying for benefits. Of these 56 families, 25 families (45%) were contacted by phone and 21 families (38%) were successfully connected to WIC or SNAP or provided with the information they requested. However, many families (55%) could not be reached because their contact information in their electronic health record was incorrect (12%) or they did not respond to calls from the resource navigator (43%).

“The approach we developed may be one of the important ways to standardize social needs assessments and provide additional nutritional support to families,” said Aditi Vasan, MD, PhD, attending physician in CHOP’s Department of General Pediatrics and lead author of the study.

“To ensure all families in need receive the appropriate support, clinics should encourage caregivers to expect follow-up from resource navigators, ask them their preferred method of contact, and consider incorporating additional outreach approaches such as text messaging.”