Instacart, DispatchHealth partner to tackle food insecurity

In-home care provider DispatchHealth and grocery delivery company Instacart announced a partnership to provide Dispatch’s in-home care professionals with tools to prescribe food to patients using Instacart Health. 

DispatchHealth offers patients in-home urgent care medical visits, which can be scheduled via telephone or the company’s app or website. A clinician arrives at the patient’s home within two hours. Two medical professionals, either a physician assistant or nurse practitioner and a DispatchHealth medical technician, are sent to each home visit.

Instacart Health, launched in 2022, gives providers access to Virtual Storefronts, allowing them to create a curated shop for patients with food recommendations. The company also offers Shoppable Recipes, which helps providers recommend healthy recipes to patients, and Lists for Nutrition, which enables providers to build medically tailored grocery lists. 

Through the partnership, Dispatch’s in-home providers can prescribe food interventions for patients through Instacart Health. 

“Our patients’ well-being is closely tied to their environment, and we witness firsthand how social determinants like nutritional accessibility affect their overall health. We are literally in the kitchen with our patients and not many provider groups can get to that level of granularity,” DispatchHealth chief medical officer Dr. Phil Mitchell said in a statement. “Our collaboration with Instacart empowers us to bridge these gaps and bring about tangible improvements in our patients’ lives.”

THE LARGER TREND

When Instacart initially launched its health division, its offerings included products focused on providing nutritious foods, forming strategic partnerships and advocating for food policy such as expanding online access to EBT SNAP and TANF assistance programs.

The company expanded its health division to include provider-facing tools in March last year.

DispatchHealth has established numerous partnerships, including a collaboration with Blue Shield of California in which the health insurer’s members in Southern California would have access to home care, and with Oklahoma’s Saint Francis Health System to offer in-home care services in the Tulsa area.  

Marshfield Clinic Health System, a large rural health system, also announced a partnership with DispatchHealth in 2022 to offer in-home acute care in Wisconsin. 

California-based virtual care company Included Health, which provides healthcare benefits and insurance navigation services as well as virtual primary care, behavioral health, specialty care and 24/7 urgent care appointments, partnered with the company last year. 

In 2022, DispatchHealth raised $330 million in funding, bringing its total raise to over $700 million. The company scored $200 million in Series D financing a year before.