A Novel Culinary Medicine Service Line: Practical Strategy for Food as Medicine

Evidence-based, practical nutrition and cooking guidance is seen as a strategy to address rising chronic disease burden.However, this resource remains limited in health care settings due to lack of time, expertise, funding, and access to registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs).To address this challenge at an academic medical center, the culinary medicine (CM) clinical service line was developed and piloted at a community clinic beginning in December 2022.This unique, billable service provided outpatient consultations with both a physician and a dietitian certified in CM.The pilot study focuses on the design and evaluation of the first 2.5 years after implementation of this novel service, specifically highlighting the patients referred to the clinic, the source of referrals, and how payers reimburse the CM service.The model was developed as an interprofessional three-arm CM clinical service line with phased implementation of three billable encounter types: electronic consults (physician to physician or RDN electronic consult), one-toone clinic consults (patient sees physician, physician discusses with RDN, patient sees RDN), and shared medical appointments (about 10-16 patients with physician, RDN, and volunteers at a community center with a kitchen).This article provides analysis of the clinical encounter, scheduling, and billing data over 30 months for the novel oneto-one clinic consult implementation and includes description of patient demographics (age, sex, race or ethnicity), referral data, referral diagnoses, appointment scheduling, reimbursement, and participant and stakeholder experiences.Between December 2022 and May 2025, the CM clinic received 387 total referrals, with 199 completed new patient consults (54% completion rate).Primary care clinicians generated most of the referrals (88%, N=327).The mean patient age at referral was 54 years, and patients were mostly ARTICLE