Medically tailored meals (MTMs) and produce prescription programs can help reduce hospitalizations, improve health outcomes, and save billions of dollars in healthcare costs, a report issued by Tufts University Food Is Medicine Institute finds. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the report, True Cost of Food: Food is Medicine Case Study (40 pages, PDF), highlights two case studies. The first evaluated the health equity and economic benefits of MTM programs for Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance patients with both a diet-related condition and limited ability to perform activities of daily living and found that national implementation of MTMs could help avert approximately 1.6 million hospitalizations and create estimated net savings of $13.6 billion in the first year. The second evaluated produce prescription programs for patients with both diabetes and food insecurity and found that national implementation could avert 292,000 cardiovascular events and add 260,000 quality-adjusted life years—a measure of how well a treatment lengthens or improves patients’ lives—while being highly cost-effective.