Food as Medicine Comes to the Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation

Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford in 2005 that you cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward, and only then does a life’s seemingly scattered work reveal itself as something more deliberate. Harry Hayman has been sitting with that idea. He has moved across professional worlds that rarely sit at the same table: music production through INSOMNIA PRODUCTIONS, hospitality consulting, food justice advocacy, documentary filmmaking, and civic policy work as a Senior Fellow at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia focused on Food Economy and Policy. From inside those years, the chapters can feel unrelated. From where Harry Hayman now stands, they are beginning to look like one long argument built toward a single purpose, and the Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation is where that argument finds its most direct expression.

In August 2026, Harry Hayman announced that he is moving from the role of Trustee to a significantly more operational presence at the Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation, created in honor and memory of his brother, Brad. He will help develop partnerships, build relationships, and connect people and ideas in service of the Foundation’s mission. He is also bringing a substantial portion of his life’s work along with him: food insecurity, nutrition, food as medicine, and health equity. The claim underneath that decision is one Harry Hayman has been making in various forms for years. What happens in kitchens, schools, neighborhoods, and food systems ultimately shows up in hospitals.

The Foundation and Its Central Question

The Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation was created in honor and memory of Harry Hayman’s brother, Brad, and carries forward his life and spirit. Its animating question, as Harry Hayman describes it, is a large and serious one: how to improve healthcare, improve people’s lives, and keep them alive when something bad happens?

That question has guided the Foundation’s work across many years and across borders. Harry Hayman does not name the Foundation’s specific programs or describe its internal structure in his announcement, and this account follows that lead. What he does describe is a sustained investment of time, resources, and energy into one of the hardest problems any family or any society can take on. Along the way, the Foundation built an enduring relationship with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has become one of the most consequential forces in the global effort to change how healthcare systems perform.

For Harry Hayman, moving from trustee to a more operational role is not a departure from what he has been doing in the rest of his professional life. The food insecurity and food justice work he has pursued through his collaboration with Feed Philly Coalition, through his Economy League fellowship, and through his documentary filmmaking has always circled the same underlying questions: who has access to the conditions that make health possible, and what do institutions owe the people they serve? The Foundation is, he says, where he can now pursue those questions under a bigger umbrella alongside people who have been thinking about healthcare improvement as a systemic challenge for decades.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement was founded more than thirty years ago and has since grown into a global organization with a presence across 62 countries. According to the organization’s 2025 Impact Report, IHI has engaged more than eight thousand organizations and reached more than seven million people through its improvement initiatives. Its work applies improvement science, a rigorous methodology for identifying what works in complex healthcare systems and making those improvements durable over time.

Healthcare improvement, as IHI understands it, is not only a clinical undertaking. It is also a question of culture, leadership, and the organizational conditions that determine whether better medicine actually reaches the people who need it. The leadership development dimension of IHI’s work is central to the Foundation’s partnership with the organization. IHI runs the IHI Fellowship Program, a program spanning fourteen months that takes experienced professionals in quality and patient safety and develops their capacity to lead system changes at organizational, national, and international levels. Fellows work on real improvement projects inside their home organizations while receiving mentorship from IHI faculty and collaborating with a global cohort of peers. The organization also runs structured programs designed to bring patient safety and quality skills to emerging healthcare leaders, working with students, educators, and practitioners committed to the sustained work of improving how care is delivered.

Harry Hayman’s announcement centers specifically on this dimension of IHI’s mission: the effort to develop the next generation of healthcare leaders through the work of students, educators, and healthcare professionals dedicated to improving health and healthcare. That focus connects the Foundation’s purpose to IHI’s core argument, which is that lasting healthcare improvement depends not only on better systems but on better-equipped people leading those systems through the years when the change is still fragile.

The Research Behind Food as Medicine

The second piece that Harry Hayman is bringing to the Foundation’s work is food. Not as a complement to healthcare and not as a parallel social program, but as a direct clinical intervention. The evidence base for that position has been building for decades, and the policy response has accelerated sharply in recent years.

Feeding America’s research, drawing on the most recent USDA data, estimates that approximately forty-eight million Americans live in food insecure households as of 2024. Roughly 13.7 percent of all U.S. households experienced food insecurity, meaning that at some point during the year, members of those households did not know when or how their next nutritious meal would come. The health consequences of that uncertainty are well documented. Research published in Health Affairs established a direct statistical relationship between food insecurity and a cluster of costly chronic conditions: diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and the downstream emergency department visits and hospitalizations those conditions generate.

The CDC’s work on the relationship between diabetes and food insecurity makes the mechanism plain. People without reliable access to nutritious food cope by purchasing inexpensive food that is dense in calories and low in nutrition, or by eating less. Both paths increase the risk of chronic illness. Both paths increase the eventual cost to the healthcare system. Research highlighted by the Food Bank News network found that food insecurity accounted for nearly fifty-three billion dollars in excess healthcare expenditures in the United States in a single year.

The Food is Medicine framework takes that chain of causation seriously and asks a pointed question: what if the healthcare system treated food as a clinical intervention rather than a social problem? The NIH has designated Food is Medicine as a highlighted research priority, supporting studies on medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and targeted nutrition interventions for people with chronic, diet-sensitive conditions. Research published in PMC on the delivery and outcomes of community-based medically tailored meal programs has documented reduced hospital utilization and improved health outcomes among high-risk patients receiving those meals. A 2025 article in Health Affairs examining the economic case for medically tailored meals at scale found significant potential to reduce healthcare expenditures if the model were expanded nationally. As of early 2025, sixteen states had approved or proposed Medicaid Section 1115 waivers that would allow medically tailored meals to be covered as a clinical service. The Food is Medicine Coalition, a national network of organizations providing those meals and nutrition services to people living with serious illness, released a first-of-its-kind sustainability blueprint in 2025 aimed at embedding the model durably into the U.S. healthcare system. A broader review published in PMC of the case for advancing Food is Medicine in the United States notes that the framework has gained traction precisely because it addresses chronic disease before the hospital visit, not after it.

Harry Hayman has been making this argument in various forms throughout his advocacy career. The Foundation gives him an institutional structure to carry that argument into the spaces where healthcare improvement decisions are actually made.

When Kitchens and Hospitals Are Part of the Same System

The divide between healthcare improvement and food justice is, in practice, largely organizational. Hospitals and health systems sit in one world. Food banks, community kitchens, school nutrition programs, and food policy advocates sit in another. The research does not honor that divide. The chronic conditions that fill emergency departments across the country were shaped by systems that operated long before any clinical encounter: what food was available at what price in which neighborhood, what the school cafeteria served, what the corner store stocked, what community health infrastructure existed and for whom.

Harry Hayman describes the argument directly:

“Food, health, dignity and opportunity are not separate issues. They are pieces of the same damn puzzle.”

And:

“I am not leaving that work behind. I am putting a bigger umbrella over it.”

The Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation, through its relationship with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is positioned to sit in the healthcare improvement world. Harry Hayman, through years of food justice work in Philadelphia and beyond, is positioned to bring the food and nutrition dimension into that space. What the next chapter of that combination looks like, and what it produces, is an open question. The work is not the announcement. The announcement is the beginning of it.

The Foundation and Its Central Question

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement

The Research Behind Food as Medicine

When Kitchens and Hospitals Are Part of the Same System

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