UNC expands restaurant delivery to new hospital

UNC Healthcare’s two-year-old Restaurant Delivery program has made an encore performance at the recently acquired High Point Regional Hospital, in High Point. N.C. Angelo Mojica, director of food and nutrition services for UNC Hospitals, says the room service program kicked off less than two months ago at the 425-bed hospital.

High Point’s version is smaller than what is executed at UNC. (See “The 2013 Goldies Awards,” May 2013.) The program allows patients to order meals from the hospital’s retail outlets. High Point’s version offers 18 of the 20 retail concepts offered at UNC and a 16-page patient menu. UNC’s menu is 20 pages long and has nearly 100 entrées.

“Most of the changes have to do with what equipment High Point’s team has available,” Mojica notes. “We laid out all of our concepts like a menu and let them choose which ones they wanted. The only two concepts we didn’t do were sushi and Red Ginger.”

On the retail side, early results have been favorable. On opening day retail sales were 25% higher than High Point’s highest day ever, “and sales have been sustained,” he notes. “If we get the higher patient satisfaction scores we expect, it will prove the concept really has legs.”

Mojica, who is part of a team of UNC managers overseeing foodservice while High Point searches for a new foodservice director, says the expansion of Restaurant Delivery will benefit both hospitals. It also opens the door for further growth; there are currently eight hospitals in the UNC Healthcare system, and Mojica plans to take the program to a third hospital this summer.

“What is nice about the expansion is that it leverages our system efficiencies,” he explains. “Now we’re buying for multiple hospitals, instead of just one.”