National Nutrition Month® 2021: How End-to-End Foodservice Software Can Help Care Communities Deliver Personalized Nutrition to Patients & Residents

This March, National Nutrition Month® is all about the theme: Personalize Your Plate!

An acknowledgement that good nutrition looks different for every individual, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics encourages a focus on creating "nutritious meals to meet cultural and personal food preferences".

Albeit senior living, long term care or acute care – when you’ve got an entire community to feed, it can be a challenge to ensure everyone receives meals and snacks that suit their taste, nutritional needs, lifestyles, preferences, diet orders and more.

All-in-one foodservice management technology makes it easier to not only record patient and resident nutritional needs, but cater to them, monitor them and ensure you’re meeting them meal after meal.

The best patient or resident diet systems can help you deliver nutrition as unique as the individual you’re serving from the moment they’re welcomed into to your community. Here’s how you can use end-to-end foodservice management technology to Personalize THEIR Plate with ease this National Nutrition Month® and beyond:

Access Thousands of Regular & Extended Recipes for Personal Menu Planning

When you already have enough on your to-do list, creating recipes & building menus while considering all the appropriate extensions for your patients and residents can begin to feel overwhelming to say the least.

But what if you could access an abundance of expertly created recipes with extensions you can use to build personal menus that fit their needs and preferences to a tee?

When you choose an end-to-end foodservice management software like MealSuite^®, you’ll have access to 9,000+ regular, texture-modified and therapeutic recipes (including fortified recipes) created by registered dietitians, with fresh, innovative items being added to the database every season. Use the recipes to make your own menus while enjoying special Holiday, Seasonal and Emergency Menus so you can celebrate delicious moments and prepare for the unexpected.

Use MealSuite^®’s recipes, create your own, or modify one of ours to quickly add your own flare.

Shown Here: With MealSuite^®, you can manage the Diets and Texture modifications of a recipe directly in just a few clicks.

With Recipes and Menu Modules fully integrated with our comprehensive People Profiles (read on to learn more about them!), you can plan around the database of delicious recipes to personalize your patient or residents’ plates with ease.

Have Dietary Details at Your Fingertips with Comprehensive People Profiles

There’s no doubt that when each of your patients or residents come with a unique set of diet orders, texture modifications, personal preferences and more – it can begin to feel like a juggling act to stay on top of it all.

The best patient or resident diet systems offer the relief you deserve with comprehensive People Profiles that help your team track everything you need to know when it comes to taking orders, preparing a meal for and serving any individual, no matter their taste, lifestyle or dietary requirements.

With fully integrated foodservice management technology from MealSuite^® in particular, you can tailor menu offerings and printed tickets so every individual’s select menu is enticing and appropriate for them. Plus – view a week-at-a-glance menu for each individual, easily customize menus based on regional and population preferences, with the option to apply additional diet interventions via the People Profiles for efficient management of diet orders, interventions, allergens and dislikes.

With all of these available tools and more, you can ensure offerings to patients and residents are in their best interest, with the ability to maintain their freedom of choice with Advance Ordering or Tableside Select Technology.

Stay Up-to-Date with Connect Technology

Whether they’re staying for a few days, or indefinitely – it’s important to capture each patient and resident’s unique needs from the moment they’re welcomed into your community, and keep them up-to date as they may evolve over time.

The best foodservice management software offer Connect Technology that helps you ensure patients and residents’ requirements and records – new and old – are always up to date, in any digital location your staff may be referring to diets.

For instance, Connect Technology from MealSuite^® drives diet order, allergy and admission, discharge & transfer (ADT) data from your EMR system into our end-to-end dietary, food production and POS solution in real-time so your foodservice and clinical nutrition teams always have the most current care data at thier fingertips.

Record & Reference Portion Size Adjustments for Their Precise Plate

With the right foodservice management software on your side, not only can you access the recipes you need to create a personalized meal plan – you can also indicate how the meal is to be served based on specific needs and requirements.

The best foodservice software offers a Weekly Personal Menu complete with a substitutions feature for further customizations such as desired serving size – for example: customize entrée portion, reduce dessert portion or modify starch serving.

Plus, if your patient or resident has specific needs for consuming their meals, such as needing assistance with cutting their meat, you can add those personalized notes to their profile for easy reference at service to ensure they’re getting the intake you’ve intended for them.

National Nutrition Month® is a great opportunity to reflect on how much of an impact personalized nutrition can have on a patient or resident’s overall health, well-being and quality of life. And when personalizing the plates of each individual in your community can be a challenge, end-to-end foodservice management technology steps in to help you reach your goals.

If you’re interested in learning more about the next generation of foodservice management software from MealSuite^® – and how we’ve helped countless communities across North America reach their nutritional goals – there’s no better time to connect with us for a personal demo.