Ardmore Institute of Health Announces Fall 2024 Grant Recipients
Ardmore Institute of Health (AIH) is pleased to announce its Fall 2024 grant recipients. Through strategic grantmaking, AIH collaborates with mission-aligned organizations to fund innovative projects that support AIH’s objectives of advancing Whole Person Care and Lifestyle Medicine.
This fall, AIH awarded $1,581,070 across 13 projects that will help advance our vision: a future where healthy environments and lifestyles provide equitable and preferred methods to prevent, treat, and reverse chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Continue reading to learn more about each project.
Expanding the Impact of Whole Person Care
AdventHealth | Altamonte Springs, FL
$250,000
AdventHealth (AH) is partnering with Ardmore Institute of Health (AIH) to create a whole-person care approach to primary care delivery that leverages emerging precepts of Whole Health, including Lifestyle Medicine as articulated by NASEM, ACLM, AAFP, ACCM, AIH, Healing Works Foundation, and similar national thought leaders. Primary care delivery at AH (traditional care, Well65+, PCP+, and Centra Care) often prioritizes specialty referrals, making it a weak link in the clinical chain. AH plans to strengthen primary care delivery, making it a differentiator and aligning economic levers to support – to deliver primary care “the AdventHealth whole-person care way.” This proposal aligns with the AIH strategic areas of Lifestyle Medicine and seeks to bring lifestyle medicine into the mainstream of its clinical practice. The primary goal is to develop a scalable and sustainable approach to whole-person care that improves patient outcomes, increases engagement/well-being and decreases turnover. AH will expand the quality and influence of whole-person care in the primary care network while using the network's scale to positively influence payers and communities with meaningful economic and health outcomes. An essential element of this work is to introduce best practices, along with current practices around a whole-person lifestyle framework, to drive whole-person care in the primary care settings.
Scaling Whole Health in Primary Care: Value-Based Care + Lifestyle Medicine
American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation | Leawood, KS
$125,130
The AAFP proposes that it host a multi-stakeholder convening on Whole Health and Primary Care with the primary goal of addressing how to scale and sustain adoption of “whole health care” approaches in primary care that are compatible with value-based payment. The primary mechanisms of change that are in-scope for the convening include training and payment (reimbursement). The convening will target organizations and individuals in the public and private sector with decision-making authority or influence over relevant payment and workforce training policies and/or practices.
Specific goals of the convening include the following:
Identify and connect related whole health and whole health care initiatives that have the potential to scale further, faster by being connected with one another and/or working together rather than separately.
Identify barriers or obstacles that could slow or thwart progress toward adoption of whole health approaches in primary care.
Develop consensus statements that reflect broader aims of whole health for primary care patients and clinicians to guide individual efforts.
Position family and other primary care physicians as change agents and leaders in the shift to whole health and health care.
Identify resources that enable the adoption of a whole health primary care orientation targeting individual physicians, primary care practices and the organizations that support them including hospital/health systems, private equity/investors.
AIH looks forward to funding this project alongside the Healing Works Foundation.
The Family Lifestyle Program (FLiP) - Addressing Food Insecurity and Diet Related Chronic Disease Risk in Under-served Communities
Children’s Research Institute | Washington, DC
$149,554
The Family Lifestyle Program (FLiP) is a clinical community collaborative that aims to address Food Insecurity (FI) and diet-related chronic disease risk in families with children living in underserved communities. FLiP increases access to affordable healthy food and evidence-based, plant predominant nutrition education designed to prevent, treat or reverse diet-related disease. FLiP seamlessly connects the healthcare setting at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) and community resources through Patient Navigators (PN) and a 6-month produce prescription and nutrition education intervention (FLiPRx). In the proposed work, CNH clinicians will refer families who screen positive for low food access or who express a need for healthy food, nutrition education, or physical activity resources. Referred families will consult with a PN who will provide a tailored list of community resources, including FLiPRx. Families enrolled in FLiPRx will receive 6 or 18 pounds of fresh produce delivered to their home every other week along with nutrition, culinary, and physical activity education via virtual monthly classes and an in person monthly session of “Walk with a Doc.” We will conduct a longitudinal cohort study to evaluate the impact of the FLiPRx intervention on FI, health outcomes, and healthcare cost. We will use quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including self-report surveys, qualitative interviews, an electronic medical chart review, and healthcare claims data.
Nourish and Thrive Virtual Health Education and Cooking Program
Cooking on Purpose Inc | Browns Summit, NC
$30,000
The Nourish and Thrive Virtual Health Education and Cooking Program is a 16-week course based on Full Plate Living's shared medical appointment resources. Participants will meet with physicians specialized in obesity medicine and preventive medicine, with an emphasis on lifestyle medicine. We will use the Full Plate Living curriculum to guide the group sessions held Bi-weekly for a total of eight sessions. To address food and nutrition insecurity, we will send gift bags to each participant with items including aprons, cooking utensils, grocery store gift cards, etc. during the program.
Goals-to help participants gain skills for healthy living using the FPL curriculum with minimal changes to fit demographic and community needs and to include additional pillars of lifestyle medicine. To make easy-to-follow healthy recipes that are culturally appropriate and improve self-efficacy and adherence to their personal goals. Teaching fiber-rich food options for healthy living.
Measurements- We will use pre and post-assessment survey tools to measure the knowledge and self-efficacy changes before and after the program.
Anticipated Outcomes- We anticipate outcomes of increased self-efficacy related to cooking healthy foods, and choosing healthy options inside the home and out. Improving confidence while grocery shopping and incorporating lifestyle medicine pillars into daily life.
Food Is Medicine Shared Medical Appointments for Weight Management: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
Duke University | Durham, NC
$77,149
The Duke University Health System Food Is Medicine Shared Medical Appointments for Weight Management pilot trial will randomize patients with obesity to the Full Plate Living in-person, four-session shared medical appointment curriculum integrated with two teaching kitchen sessions or to a control virtual, self-guided online Full Plate Living curriculum. Both arms will receive a medically tailored grocery intervention delivered every two weeks during the eight-week study as an incentive for participating and to promote healthy dietary pattern changes. The primary outcomes of this study are intervention feasibility and acceptability perceived by patients and health system staff, based on validated survey-based measures and guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. Changes in participant biometric data are exploratory secondary outcomes. The results from this study will demonstrate the feasibility of integrating shared medical appointments with a teaching kitchen component as a reimbursable service at Duke University. This foundational study will provide the evidence base necessary to expand our adapted Full Plate Living shared medical appointment curriculum to a larger, definitive multi-site randomized controlled trial powered to identify improvements in health outcomes such as weight reduction, blood pressure reduction, and glycemic control.
Medical Education Transformation and Strengthening Food Justice
Endeavor Health | Evanston, IL
$80,000
Arm One will refine, uplift, and expand our existing CM program, moving from the current 15 students to all 90 medical students.
The course covers the benefits of food as medicine for health and empowers them to guide patients in adopting better nutritional habits tailored to their specific needs.
The following arms utilize " train the trainer" programming to increase impact and reach for Chicago's most vulnerable kids and patients.
Arm Two refines and scales our Food Is Power Program in Chicago Public Schools- a decolonized, Afrocentric plant-based nutrition/food justice curriculum for kids in food apartheid affected South Chicago
Arm Three uplifts the community classes for patients with chronic conditions; a "train the trainer " program that can allow for scale and further outreach to reach more community members.
Anticipated Outcomes:
Enhanced nutritional knowledge and counseling skills among medical students, leading to better patient outcomes as they enter the workforce of practicing nutrition literate, whole food knowledgable physicians
Increased reach and impact of the Food Is Power program fostering better nutritional habits and food justice awareness among middle school students in the neighborhoods we serve: at risk, historically marginalized communities impacted by systemic inequalities
Broader access to community nutrition classes, enabling more at risk Chicagoans to manage chronic conditions through improved dietary practices.
Lifestyle Empowerment Approach for Diabetes Remission (LEADR) Program: Effectiveness, Feasibility, & Acceptability in a Self-Funded Employer Setting
Family Health International | Durham, NC
$101,000
This project will test effectiveness, feasibility, and acceptability of the Lifestyle Empowerment Approach for Diabetes Remission (LEADR) program, developed by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine through a prior Ardmore Institute of Health grant. LEADR focuses on treating diabetes through lifestyle medicine (LM), including intake of whole, high-fiber foods and is designed for delivery by clinicians through a scalable shared medical appointment (SMA) model.
The project aims are to 1) assess LEADR’s effectiveness for improving glucose control (primary outcome) and blood lipids, blood pressure, BMI, fasting insulin, dietary behavior, diabetes self-efficacy, and diabetes distress (secondary outcomes) in patients with diabetes and 2) assess feasibility and acceptability of LEADR for participants and providers. We will leverage learnings from this pilot study to further prepare LEADR for national scale.
This single-arm, pre-post study will test LEADR with employees at ECU Health in North Carolina. Our mixed-methods approach will include clinical measures and surveys with participants to assess effectiveness and interviews with program implementers and participants to assess feasibility/acceptability.
Expected impacts of this project include improved participant health outcomes through participation in an innovative SMA-based LM program and increased access to high-quality, LM-based diabetes treatment in other primary care settings in the future, informed by our findings.
Food is Medicine Convening
Food & Society at the Aspen Institute | Washington, CA
$130,000
Food & Society at The Aspen Institute proposes hosting a pilot convening workshop with American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) to elevate the Food is Medicine research and practice happening across the country and to simultaneously facilitate the entrance of new organizations and communities into the Food is Medicine movement. This pilot will be the start of a series of workshops built off the fully updated Food is Medicine Research Action Plan, released in the spring of 2024, which covers the full breadth of peer-reviewed food is medicine research, outlining its promise to address a broad swath of health issues. The forthcoming Food is Medicine Best Practices Guide will be informed by the Research Action Plan’s recommendations as well as a series of workshops to be held over the course of 2024 and early 2025.
The topic of the pilot workshop, the role of Food is Medicine in diabetes prevention and management, will take place in Tulsa, OK. The intersection of Food is Medicine patients and patients with Type 2 diabetes is well documented. This workshop is ripe for creating an action plan that those working on diabetes can use to understand and deploy Food is Medicine tools as part of a broader prevention and management strategy. Very robust research shows the efficacy of using food as medicine to both treat and reverse insulin resistance, attaining T2D remission.
Food & Society and ACLM will form a Workshop Series Planning Committee, focused first on the pilot event in Tulsa. Among the advisors we will invite include Marianna Wetherill, assistant professor of health promotion sciences at the College of Public Health, University of Oklahoma Tulsa and representatives of Blue Zones and Ardmore Institute of Health. This group will support efforts to identify subject matter experts, invitees, and compelling, relevant content.
Food & Society and ACLM workshop series, like the Food is Medicine Research Action Plan, will center equity, the role of communities, and the health care-community nexus that is central to the definition of Food is Medicine and lifestyle medicine.
The Transcriptomic Pathways of the FPL Lifestyle Accompanied with the Use of Lomaira in Latino Families with the Disease of Obesity -a pilot study
Loma Linda University | Loma Linda, CA
$70,000
The goal is to recruit 50 teams of toddlers with obesity and parent/primary care provider (PCP) with obesity in which the toddler spends at least 50% of their waking hours with the parent/grandparent that well be treated for obesity with “pharmaceutically supported lifestyle changes. This is a 36-week randomized, proof of concept, study using the Full Plate Living (FPL) lifestyle training plus either placebo or active Lomaira™ phentermine 8 mg one to three times per day.
Primary endpoints:
Toddler – Improved BMI percentiles
Parents
A. Lower BMI
B. Improved metabolic variables
Secondary endpoints – Parent’s/PCP -transcriptomics (“omic” understanding the mechanisms of weight management through nutrition and pharmaceutically supported lifestyle changes with Lomaira™
Innovation:
Many parent and child studies have been done but, to our knowledge this is first to use pharmaceutically supported lifestyle changes.
Phentermine is the obesity medication that is most commonly available for people that do not have health insurance or their insurance does not cover obesity medications. Because of its low cost, $26.00 for 100 37.5mg tablets, phentermine has become an “orphan” pharmaceutical. Since 1959, it has proven to create and maintain weight loss, but it’s mechanisms of action in humans has not been studied. This will be the first transcriptomics evaluation of Full Plate Lifestyle alone and with Lomaira™ phentermine, in adults with the disease of obesity.
MedStar Health / MedStar Institute for Innovation Culinary Medicine and Nutrition Learning Curriculum for Residents in Training
MedStar Health, Inc | Columbia, MD
$112,000
MedStar Health is grateful for the Ardmore Institute of Health’s 2023 funding to launch the Culinary Medicine and Nutrition Learning Curriculum for Residents in Training. We are now seeking funds for a second year to significantly expand and scale the program in Phase Two. The Culinary Medicine and Nutrition Curriculum for Residents-in-Training provides MedStar residents (as well as other Graduate Medical Education trainees, including interns and fellows) with education on nutrition’s role in improving health outcomes, as well as training in how to speak with patients and administer nutrition education. The program will instruct residents across MedStar Health on the benefits of healthy eating and how to counsel patients to adopt healthier habits and nutrition specific to each of their needs, with the ultimate goal of forging culinary medicine into a foundational component of the delivery of care in the US healthcare system. In the coming year, our goal is to expand the deployment of our multimodal curriculum in culinary medicine and nutrition from four specialties to additional residents-in-training across a range of 32 clinical medical specialties.
How Primary Care Can Support Whole Person Care and Behavior Change (Year 2)
Patient-Centered Primary Care Foundation | Washington, DC
$156,237
The PCC's 2025 proposal builds on year 1 activities as approved in the 2024 AIH-HW collaborative grants. In 2025, with high-level direction from PCC’s board and findings from our WPC and LM workgroup, PCC will chart an integration workplan for each of our strategic drivers—communication, policy, and collaboration. We'll review PCC’s overall strategic workplan and integrate changes to reflect a more explicit orientation around WPC and LM as PCC's stakeholders become more engaged and supportive.
More specifically, we will review PCC’s Better Health Now (BHN) campaign, the messaging platform of our policy communication effort and engage the BHN policy group and communications partners to advise us. The PCC’s behavioral health integration (BHI) committee will be engaged to inform the integration effort of WPC and LM. Agendas will be developed for discussion and decision-making. We will consult stakeholders and leaders who are currently not PCC members but who have a lot to offer and can strengthen our effectiveness in advancing WPC and LM.
We will bring the WPC/LM workgroup findings to the PCC Innovation Group (PCIG), led by retired family physician Dominique Quincy. This forum of diverse practices and clinical leaders will identify practical issues to consider to scale WPC/LM and inform policy and other enablers needed to embed WPC and LM in practice for the long haul. Our dissemination strategies in 2025 will also include sessions on WPC/LM at our annual conference.
Nutrition Competency Requirements & Development of a Repository of Nutrition Education Curricular Resources
The Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, Inc | Burlington, MA
$100,000
Medical educators and institutions are increasingly recognizing the need to improve education about food and nutrition for medical students and physician trainees. In the US, this shift has been catalyzed by the Bipartisan Resolution passed by the House of Representatives in May 2022, and the rapidly increasing interest of regulators, such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
Phase 1 of this work involved the design and implementation of a modified Delphi survey involving nutrition subject matter experts and residency program directors to identify nutrition competencies for recommendation at undergraduate and graduate medical education levels. 36 competencies were identified and are described in a manuscript which has recently been accepted by a peer-reviewed medical journal (details to follow).
Now that a consensus on nutrition competencies has been developed, we seek to pursue Phase 2 of this work by providing educators with the resources to deliver educational opportunities that meet these and future competencies.
There are three specific aims for Phase 2:
Broadly advertise the results of Phase 1 once these are published.
Create an initial prototype of a quality-assured Repository of food and nutrition educational resources, tagged to enable rapid, user-friendly searching.
Provide recommendations regarding where this Repository should be housed and maintained along with estimates regarding the cost of operationalizing and maintaining it.
High Level Medically Oriented Lifestyle Medicine Curriculum
UMass Chan Medical School (fbo Rippe Lifestyle Institute) | Worcester, MA
$200,000
The goal of this project is to develop an academically based lifestyle medicine curriculum at a major medical school for potential utilization in medical schools across the country. While a variety of curricular materials are currently available in lifestyle medicine, none have been developed with significant participation of a major medical school. Acceptance into mainstream medical schools is critically important to help imbed lifestyle medicine principles into all levels of leading institutions. UMass Chan Medical School, with Dr. Rippe’s assistance, has made a commitment to develop an evidence based curriculum for undergraduate medical students, residents and fellows and imbed and test this curriculum at these levels at the medical school.
This curriculum will be developed in consultation with the Dean of UMass Chan Medical School and the Chief of Medicine as well as the Directors of the Categorical and Primary Care Residency Programs and Cardiovascular Fellowship Program. In addition, various educational committees at UMass Chan Medical School would be involved. The curriculum will also be developed and pilot tested at the UMass Chan Medical School interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation (iCELS).
This curriculum will be developed in conjunction with the publication of the 4th Edition of Dr. Rippe’s comprehensive Lifestyle Medicine textbook which will be released in August 2024.
Learn more about AIH grantmaking, funding priorities, and how to apply for funding below.
