Coding4Food (C4F) is a community-driven project launched to fill this gap by creating new HCPCS codes for the full spectrum of FIM interventions. This initiative, facilitated by the Gravity Project and in partnership with organizations like Fullwell, brings together experts from healthcare, nutrition, and community organizations across the country. The goal is to standardize how we define and bill for services such as medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, healthy groceries, produce prescriptions, and other programs such as nutrition education through teaching kitchens, “food pharmacy” programs, and provision of cooking supplies.
The Need for Food is Medicine Codes
The FIM movement delivers services like medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions to help prevent and manage chronic illness through nutrition. However, a major barrier to scaling these interventions is the lack of standard healthcare billing codes to document and pay for them. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans receive food-based health interventions. Yet providers must resort to work-around solutions – for example, faxing invoices or using generic billing codes with modifiers – because specific codes for these services don’t exist. Codes are a critical part of health infrastructure, enabling providers to bill insurers and track patient services. Without dedicated codes, FIM services remain hard to systematically bill or include in medical records, limiting reimbursement and data collection on outcomes. In short, if healthy food interventions are to become a routine part of healthcare, they need their own HCPCS (Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System) codes just like any other medical service.
The Coding4Food Initiative
Coding4Food (C4F) is a community-driven project launched to fill this gap by creating new HCPCS codes for the full spectrum of FIM interventions. This initiative, facilitated by the Gravity Project and in partnership with organizations like Fullwell, brings together experts from healthcare, nutrition, and community organizations across the country. The goal is to standardize how we define and bill for services such as medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, healthy groceries, produce prescriptions, and more, for example nutrition education through teaching kitchens, “food pharmacy” programs, and provision of cooking supplies.
How It Works
The Coding4Food project organized a consensus-building process in 2024–2025 to precisely define each intervention in preparation for code submissions. In Phase 1, subject matter expert workgroups (selected from dozens of applicants) focused on the most common interventions: medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, healthy groceries, and produce prescription programs. These workgroups, guided by a national advisory committee of FIM leaders, met over several months to craft clear, concise service definitions. They even incorporated feedback from patients receiving these services to ensure definitions reflected real-world practice and needs. The result was a set of consensus definitions that distinguish each intervention’s scope and standards.
Phase I: Definitions of Key FIM Interventions
The first phase of Coding4Food produced standardized definitions for four foundational Food is Medicine interventions. These definitions helped form the basis of the new code requests and helped clarify what each service entails, which is important for payers and policymakers. The Phase 1 intervention definitions included produce prescription, medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, and healthy groceries.
Phase 2: Revised/Additional Definitions of Key FIM Interventions
The second phase is also completed and includes additional definitions submitted to CMS in June 2025. These definitions can be found using the links below.
HCPCS Submission - June 2025