The hospital plans to build a new $6 million kitchen.
Nutritional services aide MaryAnne Cowan delivers lunch last month to Tammy Decker-Jace, of Manlius. Syracuse, NY -- St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center wants to put to rest the endless jokes about unappetizing hospital food.
The Syracuse hospital plans to build a new $6 million kitchen so it can dish up custom-made meals for patients the same way hotels provide room service. Patients will be able to pick up the phone, order off a menu and get meals delivered in about 30 minutes.
“By providing people the food they want when they want it, we’ll help them heal better ...,’’ said Jamie Nicolosi, the hospital’s director of nutritional services.
St. Joseph’s became the first hospital in the city to offer room service, in 2005, when it began providing it on a limited basis, in its maternity unit. It will expand the service to all patients when the new kitchen is finished next fall. The hospital prepares about 1,000 patient meals daily.
Room service is a rapidly growing trend in the hospital industry. About 40 percent of U.S. hospitals have adopted this approach, said Gary T. Conley, president of Room Service Technologies, a Tampa, Fla.,-based hospital consulting firm.
Hospitals are switching to room service to boost their scores on patient satisfaction surveys, he said. Food often gets a thumbs-down from patients, Conley said.
“You hear the hospital food jokes, and hospitals are saying, ‘We have to get rid of that image,’” he said. “Hospitals are using food as a marketing tool.”
Maintaining high patient satisfaction is important because of health care’s increasingly competitive nature. Hospitals also vie for patients, by offering valet parking, single rooms, wood floors, concierge services and other amenities.
Green Jell-O and mystery meat covered with gobs of gravy are being replaced by restaurant-quality meals prepared by highly trained chefs. Some hospitals are beginning to use organic food products, Conley said.
Custom-made meals also reduce waste.
Most patients don’t want meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, bread, a container of milk and dessert for lunch because that’s too much food, Conley said.
“But we gave them all those things whether they wanted it or not,” he said.
Many hospitals that have made the switch have seen their food costs drop up to 20 percent, because when patients order what they want, there’s less thrown out, he said.
St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, Long Island, serves about 900 patient meals a day and cut its food costs by $150,000 when it started room service in 2005. The hospital used to toss out a lot of supplement drinks like Ensure that were being delivered to patients and not being consumed, said Maura Dillon, the hospital’s director of food and nutritional services. Now, patients don’t get those items unless they order them, she said.
Broiled salmon is one of the most popular items on the menu at St. Francis, Dillon said, noting that comfort foods, like meatloaf and macaroni and cheese, are also popular. .’’In a hospital, you don’t have a lot of choice or input about most things,” Dillon said. “But if you can call in your meal order and make your choices, you have a lot of control over that, which makes the patient feel much better.”
In a traditional hospital kitchen, 300 pieces of chicken might be baked in advance and kept warm until they’re served, said Conley, of Room Service Technologies. The chicken and other food items are then put on trays on an assembly line conveyor belt by a team of kitchen workers, he said.
With room service, a piece of chicken does not get cooked until a patient orders it, he said, and instead of lunch being restricted to one hour, some patients may order lunch at 10:30 a.m. and others at 2 p.m.
“There is no reason anymore to assemble four or five trays a minute, because we are responding to every patient’s call,” he said. “That takes the assembly-line rush mentality out of the picture.”
“The biggest change is the cooks will be putting the food right onto the plate right after it’s made,” Nicolosi said.
To enable staff to design the new kitchen’s layout at St. Joseph’s, Nicolosi has created a cardboard room-service kitchen on the eighth floor of the physicians office building.
Initially, the menu will be what’s used now in the maternity unit, Nicolosi said.
The hospital recently hired Jeffrey S. Mitchell as its certified executive chef, a new position at St. Joe’s. Mitchell has worked in hotels, a luxury resort, higher education and health care.
Nicolosi said Mitchell will expand the menu and focus on improving quality and presentation.
Hospital patients used to accept whatever food was put in front of them without complaining, Nicolosi said.
Not anymore.
“Baby boomers are aging, and their expectations are much different,” he said. “Food is important to them, and they are much more vocal.”
Contact James T. Mulder at 470-2245 or jmulder@syracuse.com