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How-To Guide: Partnering with 

Health Care Systems

Why should we partner with a health care system? 

• Give your clients access to health professionals. 

• Update your nutrition education materials. 

• Learn how to create medically tailored meals or have health care systems 

provide medically tailored meals. 

• Expand awareness of your program and increase participation. 

How can our program and the health care system benefit 

from each other?

Both health care systems and nutrition programs want positive outcomes for their 

clients. Many of these systems use various data collection methods to assess their 

success. All nutrition programs collect a wealth of data that includes demographics, 

health status including nutrition risk and malnutrition, living status, socioeconomic 

status, and more. This data is valuable to health care systems to help measure 

health outcomes; one example might be using scores over time on the DETERMINE 

checklist to develop a health metric. In turn, your partnership can help to improve 

these scores for your clients, especially when offering services in collaboration with a 

health care system.

What are some potential partnership opportunities?

• Delivering medically tailored meals. 

• Delivering meals for people on short-term disability or recently discharged 

from the hospital.
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• Creating a referral process for both community and home-delivered meal 

programs.

• Offering nutrition education and counseling to clients.

• Hosting healthy cooking demonstrations.

• Rotating of dietetic interns through your nutrition program who can offer 

expertise and free support.

Where do we start?

Evaluate your goals and objectives in partnering. Establish some direction for the 

partnership or generate some ideas on how you would like to engage. Revisit your 

strategic plan and decide how the partnership can align with it. Consider these 

questions, potentially as a group activity:

• Is your organization achieving its strategic goals? If not, how can a partnership 

with a hospital system assist your organization in achieving its goals?

• What problem is this partnership meant to tackle? What can this partnership 

do that cannot be done in-house?

• What organizational goals can be met by this partnership?

• What product, programmatic, business and pricing goals do you have for your 

anticipated collaboration?

Where can we find more resources?

The Nutrition and Aging Resource Center website has links to many useful 

presentations, toolkits, and documents, including: 

• The Aging and Disability Business Institute's contracting toolkit and sample 

contracts

• Presentations and other resources on working with health care systems

• Guides and resources on business skills

This project was supported in part by grant number 90PPNU0002 from the Administration for 

Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. 20201. 

Grantees undertaking projects with government sponsorship are encouraged to express 

freely their findings and conclusions. Points of view or opinions do not, therefore, necessarily 

represent official ACL policy.

Created in partnership with the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services 

Programs. For more information on NANASP, visit nanasp.org.