Healthcare Trend Talks

From Pilot to Payment: Building Sustainable Food as Healthcare

Food as Medicine programs are everywhere, yet few are built to last. Without reimbursement infrastructure, many initiatives remain grant dependent and difficult to scale.

In this session, Vanessa Sena, Founder and CEO of CenaHealth, will examine how food based interventions can move from pilot projects to financially sustainable healthcare services. As a value based care partner working with hospital systems and payers, she will discuss how medically tailored meals and nutrition services align with CPT billing, value based PMPM arrangements, and shared savings models.

Participants will learn:

• The financial architecture required to make food interventions sustainable
• How to integrate nutrition into risk bearing and value based environments
• Common design flaws that prevent Food as Medicine programs from scaling
• A framework for evaluating food based initiatives within a hospital or payer continuum of care

Designed for healthcare executives, clinicians, and policy leaders, this session offers a practical lens on how nutrition can become a reimbursable and accountable component of modern healthcare delivery.