We are pleased to announce that Dr. Saba Khan has joined Epicured as our Chief Medical Officer!
Dr. Khan is an academic pediatrician from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where she maintains her practice. She brings over 15 years of experience creating and running food pharmacies in a variety of clinical and community settings. Dr. Khan has long championed nutrition as the most effective way to achieve and maintain intergenerational wellness and to avoid poor health outcomes at all stages of life.
As our CMO, Dr. Khan will be leading our Partners in Health community, expanding its reach across medical specialties and the health landscape, including providers, payers, and policymakers.
As a senior member of our management team, she will influence every aspect of our business, ensuring that we continue to forge a path to improve health outcomes through the effective use of nutrition and food as medicine solutions.
She’s eager to engage with our community to learn how they are incorporating good food and nutrition into their care delivery models. From when we first developed and delivered our first medically tailored meal, the healthcare industry has come a long way in how it thinks about nutrition but we still have much to do. Dr. Khan and the Epicured team look forward to continuing to partner with you, hear from you, work with you, and create novel approaches to improving people’s lives one meal at a time.
Get to Know Dr. Saba Khan
We sat down with Dr. Khan to ask her a few questions about her pioneering work with food pharmacies, how the industry is shifting its perspective on Food is Medicine initiatives, and the challenges programs have to overcome to make progress in the communities they serve.
You founded one of the first ever pediatric food pharmacies in 2018 – what do you consider the program’s greatest success so far?
First, thank you Epicured! I am thrilled to be part of a healthcare company that’s moving the needle on healthy food options for all communities!
The biggest success of the food pharmacies is how much families appreciate that they exist. What resonates the most is the programs are accountable, sustainable and are evolving with feedback from the communities they serve. Not unlike the Epicured universe which needs feedback from its stakeholders to remain “best in class”.
Are other healthcare organizations starting Food Pharmacies?
Many healthcare organizations are trying to get food programs started, as – thankfully – payors and providers see the potential benefits. But it’s still not that simple.
When I started the first conversation around the idea of a ‘food pharmacy’ in our pediatric weight management program, there was a lot of confusion and some resistance. How can overweight and obese children be food insecure? In 2018, even folks in healthcare didn’t realize that healthy food is a luxury for the very communities who need it the most and are at risk for the worst health outcomes. Thankfully, public health drives and education efforts have meant many sectors are more knowledgeable of SDOH and nutrition inequities.
My advice for standing up sustainable, high level food programs is simple:
- Talk to ALL the stakeholders as investors in the program, at all levels, on a regular basis — especially the users of the program.
- Big doesn’t mean better; a smaller, focused and effective program is far better than one that is large and ineffective.
- Don’t try to make it perfect or you will never get there! Apply a CQI framework so you can continuously fix, repair and improve but, mostly, just START!
Should we be thinking about Food is Medicine as an available option to improve health equity?
Stop viewing it as an option! Embrace it as a necessary investment for the current and future health of our communities – an investment with very positive returns, by the way.
We operate in a healthcare system that tends to react to poor or bad health outcomes, and tends to avoid looking at how to address the determinants contributing to health inequity and its consequences.
Start at the beginning with the food that we offer our infants, our children, and ourselves.
Nutritious, healthy food has always been the necessary foundation for human existence. Let’s start there!
Do you think the healthcare industry is starting to see the value of Food is Medicine initiatives?
Yes – finally, there is interest in FIM! The whole industry is beginning to think of nutrition, healthy meals, and medically tailored meals not as expenses to be minimized, but important strategic and tactical tools to improve health outcomes of their members and the financial health of their plans. This change is driven in part by key shifts in federal and state policy, and especially now with the expansion of funding – to the tune of billions of dollars – to cover health related social needs, of which nutrition medically tailored meals will be a very large part. There is also increasing recognition among academic researchers, providers, and payers of what we all know: nutrition intervention really works. The challenge for a plan is how to make the economics work for them, and this is where we have been making real progress.
I am hopeful that with strong research and leadership in FIM from companies like Epicured and their partners, we can continue to make advance in improving health outcomes and the wellbeing of individuals while reducing the cost of healthcare for all of us.
What has you most excited about your new role at Epicured?
I’m excited about how I can help and what I get to learn and explore with Epicured, and the communities they serve! Together we will navigate through how FIM will change the way we approach food opportunities and choices as a society.
