Authors: National Council of Urban Indian Health

Publication Year: Summer 2024

Last Updated: 2024

Keywords: Culturally Informed Care, Diabetes, Health Care Access, Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), Traditional Healing

Abstract: This report serves as an update to the National Council of Urban Indian Health’s previous reporting on recent trends in third-party billing. It specifically serves as a follow-up to last year’s report, Recent Trends in Third Party Billing at Urban Indian Organizations: Thematic Analysis of Traditional Healing Programs at Urban Indian Organizations and Meta-Analysis of Health Outcomes. Last year’s report focused on how Urban Indian Organizations (UIOs) integrate Traditional Healing into their services. In the interviews, many UIOs specifically highlighted their Traditional Foods programs as crucial to improving the emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health of their urban American Indian and Alaska Native patients, utilizing food as medicine. This year’s report builds on the information from UIOs last year regarding Traditional Food programming and how UIOs incorporate Traditional Food programs into their service offerings. As reported in last year’s findings, funding continues to be a barrier to building and sustaining Traditional Healing programs that include Traditional Foods as an intervention. UIOs rely on Medicaid payments to sustain their services, yet encounter challenges in seeking reimbursement for Traditional Food programming and services.

For this report, NCUIH interviewed seven UIOs about their Traditional Food programs and their ability or inability to bill Medicaid for Traditional Food-related activities at their facilities. Interviewed UIOs expressed the need for additional support and funding to sustain their Traditional Food programming and to better address food insecurity in the urban American Indian and Alaska Native populations they serve. Many UIOs operate programs that incorporate Traditional Foods into their food security and nutrition programming, such as food banks and meal services, community gardens, and cultural cooking and nutrition classes. The interviewed UIOs shared that they incorporate cultural knowledge into their offerings to reinvigorate traditional practices in healthy eating and physical activity. Despite these programs and services, UIOs shared they required more funding to sustain or expand these services to promote equitable access to food security programs to address the disproportionately high rates of food insecurity and associated diseases in urban American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

Type of Resource: NCUIH products (infographs, urban data reports, etc..)

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