iPads offer prompt, fresh food for patients

GAINESVILLE, Ga. — Imagine leisurely waking up after a good night’s sleep. As the sun begins to pour through the window, you pick up an in-room menu and, with the click of a button, place an order for some scrambled eggs and bacon ...  and add a blueberry muffin for good measure.

Once your meal is delivered to your room, you realize the eggs and bacon are fresh and piping hot. The blueberry muffin is made from scratch, using fresh blueberries.

This isn’t a vacation. This is a regular meal at Northeast Georgia Medical Center’s new Braselton campus. And it’s a little bit different from the plastic-looking (and sometimes plastic-tasting) hospital food that seems to be the cliche in TV shows and movies.

“All of our patient food will be cooked to order, like a restaurant,” said Chris Garrand, regional executive chef for Northeast Georgia Health System. “Up on the floors, they’ll take orders with an iPad and those orders will come right down to our monitors and print out a ticket. We’ll start making food. From the time you order to the time we serve, it’s about 35 or 40 minutes.”

The menu revolves around fresh, locally sourced ingredients to create a healthier meal for patients, guests and hospital staff. From the croissants to the molasses cookies, from the chicken noodle soup to the flatbread pizza cooked in the kitchen’s wood-burning stove, it’s all made from scratch.

“We make anything that we possibly can from scratch in-house,” Garrand said. “All the salad dressings, you name it, everything’s made from scratch.”

This is good news for patients who might be placed on special diets, particularly cardiac patients in need of low-sodium options.

“It’s a lot healthier,” Garrand said. “We can control the ingredients, and from the patient perspective, what that allows you to do is that a lot more patients can have our food because it’s not laden with sodium and preservatives and those sorts of things. They’re allowed to have a good portion of everything that’s on the menu. Which isn’t necessarily always the case, because preservatives always have some amount of sodium in them.”