RealChoices, Duke Diet & Fitness Center

Overview

RealChoices was developed for the Duke Diet & Fitness Center, a multi-disciplinary residential-style weight loss program. They approached us to convert their existing paper menu and ordering system to an electronic system.

Challenges

After reviewing any existing systems designed for restaurants or institutional food service establishments, the Duke Diet & Fitness Center gave SciMed a list of success criteria:

• The ability for clients to more easily tally their calories, macronutrients, and sodium in their food orders and to see all ingredients for menu items.

• The ability to specify multiple diet options and guide clients’ food choices within those options.

• The ability for clients to specify food allergies from a list of common ones, and enable automated warnings when they select foods that contain their allergens.

• The ability for nutrition staff to review, modify and approve menu orders for each week.

• Send automated reminders to clients who have not ordered by a specified weekly deadline.

• Enable automatic tallying of ordered menu items and ingredients for the Food Service team, for planning purposes

• Importing existing and new recipes with ingredients and nutritional analysis from a separate software (Food Processor SQL), to avoid duplicate work.

Our approach

As all our projects do, we began the planning phases by asking detailed questions about their needs and spent much time brainstorming logistics to bring the project to life in the most efficient way. Initial challenges we had to brainstorm solutions for included the complex rules that governed who could order what and when based on a person’s diet, allergies, dietitian recommendations, and meal times. The team at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center puts it this way:

I was surprised by the attention to every detail in the planning process. By asking so many questions, they were able to really tailor the program to meet our needs.

Additionally, the program was highly personal -- there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to weight loss, and the system needed to support that. We had to be very thoughtful about user permissions here; the app needed to work in harmony with the dietitian-client relationship and not undermine it. We built a framework so that dietitians could put in guardrails tailored to each participant (dietary goals, restrictions on which & how many menu items could be ordered) along with a review and approval process for submitted orders. Participants could note their own allergies and order food for themselves based on the rules set by the dietitian. This attention to detail and personalization incorporated into the product made users very happy, the Duke Diet & Fitness Center described to us:

Clients were VERY pleased with the updated system - it made our program stand out among other similar programs.

Ease of use was critical as many program participants were new or unfamiliar with technology. It was very important that the system be intuitive and easy to use so that users felt confident using the system independently. We reviewed wireframes and development progress with stakeholders often to ensure the user interface worked for them.

Uptime for the product was critical; if the system was down during meal time, then participants may not have known exactly what they ordered (and diets and nutrient intake were key!) and dining staff wouldn't know what food to prepare. We created and implemented a business continuity that the team could rely on in cases of disaster. All participant menus were made accessible offline so that the meal serving process could still happen manually if RealChoices was not online for any reason. By Working with the Duke IT team, we were able to help troubleshoot and resolve issues as they arose to avoid service disruption.

Results

SciMed launched RealChoices and supported the team at the Duke Diet & Fitness Center for 3 years. Here are the results their team saw by working with SciMed:

• The ability to track specific nutrient intakes for clients much more easily and with more precision than in the past. Enabling them to ensure better success for their clients and more opportunities for them to learn about nutrition. 

• A huge improvement in time management for food service staff. No longer did one staff member have to spend hours each week tallying menu items ordered and counting missed meals.

• The ability to track missed meals which drastically improved client success in the program.

• Nutrition staff could ensure the specific protein content of meals ordered to ensure clients received enough protein for safe weight loss. Before the RealChoices system, that was something that was not possible.