Learn more about how Morrison Healthcare uses data and analytics to help our partners standardize menus while driving a better patient and associate experience!
An interview with Gina Damon, President Operations at Compass One Healthcare, and Kevin Dorr, SVP Culinary Strategy & Innovation at Morrison Healthcare
Watch the full video below or keep scrolling to read.
–
This video is part of the Compass One Healthcare x Vizient, Inc Podcast Series.
—
Q: What does menu engineering mean in the healthcare setting?
Damon: It shouldn’t mean anything different than what it should mean in a regular retail or restaurant setting. Traditionally, in healthcare, what we’re trying to move from is that we want to have more of a focus on data, analytics, and the consumer experience. We want to treat our patients like consumers. Patients have expectations. Just because you’re admitted to a hospital tomorrow doesn’t mean that you don’t have the same preferences you did yesterday. We really want to tap into that and use those experiences to drive metrics that matter.
Dorr: I think, really just leaning on what’s happening in the industry — healthcare hasn’t always been on the cutting edge of food service, if we’re being honest, but menu engineering has been around for a long time. Restaurant 101 would tell you to lean on things that your customers love, leverage the data to find out what needs to come off. Customers are so educated now around food, more than they have ever been, so we have an opportunity to make sure that menus are fresh as food trends continue to change over time.
Q: Speaking of the customers, I know you received the retail and patient culinary strategy. How do these programs differ when talking about the healthcare setting?
Dorr: There’s a lot more things in common than there are different, to be honest with you. Food is food, and both are customers. I think both have something to learn from each other. On our retail side, everybody isn’t happy and healthy from our customers on that side either. Some people are diabetic, some may have high blood pressure, so there could be some more balanced clinical foods on the retail setting.
On the patient side, it probably needs to be less clinical. At the end of the day, food is such an important part of the healing process, and it has to be delicious. Thinking about foods on a spreadsheet to say, “It has this many calories, it has this much sodium,” it still has food that people are choosing to eat, so it really does have to be delicious to help get that nutrition inside their body and help their healing process. It’s an important part of the puzzle.
The other thing is streamlining things in the back of the house to make sure that we’re serving great food, whether it be a patient or retail. Much of the focus for culinary in the past has been on the retail side, and the clinical teams will do the patient side. We’re bringing all of that under one umbrella, and it makes so much sense for the back of the house and helps our customers to choose as well.
Q: I heard you say the word, “streamlining.” So, you’re streamlining the menus—why doesn’t more options always equate to a better outcome?
Dorr: It’s actually just the opposite. The truth is, especially in a healthcare setting for patients, they don’t want so many choices that it’s overwhelming. They have a lot going on, and food is one place they can have some comfort. Streamlining also has a bit to do with menu design, not just what is on the menu, but how it’s laid out.
Sometimes in healthcare the setting has been more of a list of menu items. It’s a paragraph, giant pages of all these options, and it’s overwhelming for customers. So, there’s definitely an art and science to menu design.
It also allows our teams to do a better job in the back of the house. Having a hundred menu items with the same amount of cooks is not setting them up for success. So, you start to do a lot of things mediocrely rather than a few things really well. It also allows us to give a bit of an “aha!” moment, where somebody says, “I didn’t see grilled cheese on your menu, can I make you one?” It allows you to give a little bit more of that human experience to say, “Yes, we’ll take care of you.” You don’t need to put every item, every little bit of your kitchen, on a menu. There’s a bit of an art and science, and a balancing act to some of those things.
Q: And you customize your menus, too, for different regions of the country to appeal to the clientele?
Dorr: I have to. We know there’s some winners, the 80-20 rule that, for 80% of the business we know a Caesar salad or some of these home-run dishes will do well across the country. But we also know that the menu in Texas had better have some things different than New York City, versus a rural hospital in Mississippi. It’s really important to make sure that the menus reflect the folks in those communities because it also shows that we’re paying attention. And the data that Gina has spoken to already doesn’t lie. We know what consumers are eating, what kind of restaurants are there, what they’re buying from the grocery store, and all of those we take into consideration when we do some menu development.
Q: Speaking of data, I know Gina, earlier you talked about technology and data. How do our systems drive standardization and some of these impressive results?
Damon: For us, it really starts with our patient dining ecosystem: just a really connected system from patient ordering to our menu management, to purchasing. We talk about data—we’ve had hundreds of millions of meals placed through our patient dining system, and that data is really powerful, and Kevin mentioned it. We know we can look at what trends are nationally, regionally. We can cut the data by various patient demographics. We can overlay all of our retail sales data and general consumer retail data in the region. The best part about it is that it’s taken all of the guesswork out so we can get to the point now with our menus, even streamlined, that we know our recommendations will make a mark. I think that’s the important part, and then that integration outside of the right menu options really drives safety, too.
Kevin touched on this; simplification in the data sounds technical but what it’s allowed us to do is be really flexible. He mentioned the grilled cheese example, we can really drive hospitality in a different way when you think about the underlying infrastructure. So, what do we want to do for many, what’s that overall menu that we have in the hospital? How might we customize that for a certain patient set? Thinking about Labor & Delivery, maybe with the way they order, the options that you provide to them are different. How do you get down to that individual, personalized experience that fits that patient’s needs? That’s the magic of the data and the systems that allow us to do that.
Dorr: I think the future is personalized nutrition. Yes, they are all patients, but if you think about whether you’re talking about pediatric, maternity, someone with heart disease, or someone that just broke their leg, you can’t treat them all the same. They don’t all have the same needs.
I think a great example of that is the work we did with a major health system recently. They had 28 hospitals, and they were big and bold enough to say, “We are looking to drive consistency and standardization across this system.” It’s not often we get clients that are ready to go all the way, but they were. They realized, “In order for us to be the brand we want to be in the community, we understand that food is medicine and the role that it plays.”
We were able to roll out one single menu, tweaked a bit for regionality, across 28 hospitals on one single day. It made all the difference in the world for our teams to be able to execute, because now we’re all holding hands and doing things in the same way. It allowed us to execute in such a high level around standardization, and the results haven’t lied. Hospitality scores are up, quality of food scores are up, food cost is continuing to be better and better, so there’s some real power in consistency and standardization across the business.
Q: Gina, what about your clinical dietitians? What are they seeing?
Damon: They’ve been thrilled, frankly, about where we’re at. They had a seat at the table with Kevin and team for the example that he just mentioned, but in general they work very closely hand-in-hand. It’s safety, it’s nutritional, it’s always just a great menu. For them, streamlining allowed us to step back and say, “What do we need that’s the best?” There’s more power in streamlining and standardizing because we can take a hard look at what we have and make sure the best items and delicious food can spread across the majority of our diets. From a dietitian perspective, that’s great for them, because their patients, regardless of the diet they’re prescribed, can have a delicious meal. It’s made their job easier, I think.
Dorr: There’s been a lot of power in the partnership between the clinical and the culinary. We have clinicians and dietitians that are chefs, and we have chefs that are dietitians—it’s really the best of both worlds. With food, the nutrition is not nutrition until you eat it, so you need to get past the spreadsheets of calorie content, etc., and make sure that it’s a balance between both sides of the ball. Our chefs learn a ton from our dietitians, keep us honest, and help us know what the patients need to heal. And the culinarians teach our dietitians a ton about keeping things clinically appropriate and correct, but it also has to be great.
There’s so much more to getting nutrition, because there’s a million things before the food. The chef in me is always saying it’s all about only the food, but it’s about what the printed menu looks like, what the tray looks like when you open the lid—how appetizing does it look? What is the aroma, the appearance, the plate presentation? There are a million things that happen before you actually eat the food. The truth is none of those patients came there to eat, it’s a necessary evil. They may not be in the mood, they may not feel so good, so the human experience component of it is important every bit as much as the food on the plate.
Q: And I’m assuming most of the meals that come to their room are the highlight of their day, really?
Dorr: Yes, it’s the one thing they have some control over, and that’s why we’ve encouraged our chefs to get up on the floor and do some rounding. That white-coat experience when you’re laying in the bed, not feeling so hot, and you have an opportunity to speak to the chef: one, to know that there’s a chef in a healthcare setting is cool, and two, many times they’re asking for really simple things that our chefs can go make happen, which allows us to bring some of that human experience back.
Q: How is the culinary team reacting to the streamlining?
Dorr: I’ve never in the history of the organization, seen more passion and energy around the patient component. Many times, I’d ask what the chef is working on, and they would show me a picture of great catering that they did for the president, or something cool they did in retail, but rarely would it have been on the patient side. The last several years, the energy that the new menu development has brought back to our teams on the patient side is amazing. We’re just coming off an amazing week, which is one of my favorite weeks for our company, which is Chef Appreciation Week, which celebrated hundreds and hundreds of chefs across the country.
We have a bit of a healthy competition between chefs, and all of that continues to drive more and more innovation around how we do what we do on the patient side, and it’s been a whole lot of fun to see a renewed energy in the back of the house. Many of those people have been working there for a long time in healthcare, they stick around. Many times, the same person’s been making the salads the same way for ten years or so. Changing the menu also energizes some of that. On the client side, it also lets people know that you understand the power of food as medicine. I think it sends a really clear message throughout the whole hospital about how serious we are about food and nutrition. This isn’t just the food service people or dietary people down the hallway, these people are partners of ours, and I think that partnership is really important.
Q: Gina, do you see the same results from the client side?
Damon: It’s great to see how re-energized our teams are about what they’re doing. It’s the menu choices, but it’s also the pride in what’s in the plate, and it’s really exciting. From the nurses’ perspective, when you think about alignment from retail choices to a patient menu, they can now speak to patients about what’s on the menu and share their personal preferences and being able to engage around that and have that connection. Supply chain really likes the simplified ordering guides, and that we can really manage cost and consistency.
I just think it’s great that at all levels of the organization—a senior leader, a CEO, COOs, down to our frontline teams—all levels excited about the same program, is pretty cool. And the results show it. Kevin touched on this: our quality of food results across the country have improved quarter over quarter for the last two years now. The metrics don’t lie. At the end of the day, we want to drive that great patient experience. We can have this cool new menu, but if it doesn’t lead to a better experience, why do it? The fact that it has is pretty exciting.
Dorr: One of the mantras I’ve used these past few years is “making more room for the good stuff,” and all of this is making more room. As things change, as tastes change, if you don’t at some point clean out your closet of old menu items, of old recipes—do we really need 45 green bean recipes, at the end of the day? What we really need is a few great ones. I think allowing our chefs a little more room to have strawberry-filled salad in the summer, and a fall harvest salad in the fall, we should be leading in that way. If you have all these menu items it clouds what our customers can see, and I think it’s an awesome opportunity to make a little more room for some of the good stuff. It’s made a big difference for our teams and our customers.
Damon: To your point, your teams have done a great job bringing in those seasonal specials and LTOs, and more excitement in the consumer experience. What would you experience in a restaurant? You have that seasonal special, your winter soup, why can’t you as a patient have that same experience?
Dorr: Who would’ve thought we were ever going to be doing limited time offers for patients? It’s been incredible, and we leverage some of the same excitement that we have on the retail side. Restaurants have been doing it for a hundred years around limited time offers, bringing things in and out of the menus Doing that same thing for the patients, especially for frequent flyers that are maybe staying there regularly or coming often, it allows them to have something fresh.
Q: My last question for you both is, what about any of our partners who haven’t done the menu change yet? What advice would you give them or how would you encourage them to take that step?
Damon: As excited as we are, and energized we are about the outcomes that we’ve received, I think you just can’t underestimate that change is hard. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of work has gone into this. But, if you have a partner with the technology and connected systems, with the data and benchmarking, with the support that makes it all come together, that’s what you really have to think about. You have to have someone that can partner with you along those dimensions. And infrastructure—we’re talking about great food, we’re talking about experience scores—but it’s really the connected infrastructure underneath that allows that to happen, allows the flexibility and hospitality. As you think about making the change, you have to consider that it’s not just the end result, it’s all the things behind it that make it happen.
Dorr: I love that. Change is definitely hard, and I think it’s not as easy sometimes as people like to think, but I’d also like to say that there’s some pain in not making changes, too, and staying with the same old thing. You’re making decisions either way, one way or another. And I think it’s an awesome opportunity.
A couple things I would say about it is, it’s a great opportunity to bring everybody under the tent. So, this is great for nursing engagement, the clinical teams, hospital leadership, frontline employees, so that when you make a change, you’re not quietly making a change on the menu, you’re making a big deal out of it and putting your stake in the ground about what your food represents for your brand. It is also cleaning out your closet a bit and making room for the good stuff. It’s important to keep these menus fresh over time. When you think about hospitals, think about the average age of maybe 75, those folks were born in 1950. It wasn’t in the Great Depression; 75 is not as old as it once was. They were 20 years old in the ‘70s, and 40 in 1990. These folks are well-traveled, depending on what kind of market they are, and they know their food. So, they’re demanding something very different from that patient experience. And I think ultimately it’s just about finding the right partner that can hold hands with you and make those big moves. That’s made all the difference for us.
