Hershey, Pa., March 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sodexo, a leader in food services and facilities management, announced today the company’s partnership with Penn State Health, a multi-hospital health system serving patients and communities across central Pennsylvania. The long-term, enterprise-wide agreement includes food services – aimed at enhancing patient, staff and visitors’ experience – for the entire health system. The change is effective immediately, with a grand opening at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center slated for May 22, 2021.   
  
“Sodexo Healthcare is proud to contribute to enhancing patient outcomes through clinical nutrition expertise at Penn State Health campuses,” said Catherine J. Tabaka, CEO for Sodexo Healthcare North America. “Through this strategic partnership, we’ll put hospitality at the forefront of patient service, helping to customize care experiences.”  
  
Penn State Health is moving to Sodexo as a single vendor to provide standardization and efficiencies system-wide while supporting its food services operations, including patient nutrition, retail services such as cafeterias, Starbucks and Au Bon Pain (on the Hershey Medical Center campus), catering, and vending. Sodexo will deliver nutritious and healthy options for patients, guests, and staff in addition to customized hospitality initiatives created with the patient experience top of mind.  

The change brought by Sodexo, which should appear seamless to patients, visitors, and staff, will increase long-term cost-effectiveness for the organization and provide an improved, consistent customer experience at food services locations and programs across the system. Through this process, the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center will transition their patient dining program to a hotel style room service model, a proven patient satisfier.   
 
The program is delivered with HealthTouch technology, a state-of-the-art diet software system designed to enhance the food ordering and tracking experience while ensuring compliance with prescribed diet orders and restrictions. The patient experience is enhanced by Experiencia, Sodexo’s proprietary insights platform that enables teams to uniquely address each patient’s needs along their care journey, leveraging predictive data and real-time insights.  

About Sodexo North America  

At Sodexo Healthcare we build trusted partnerships with health systems to support their care delivery mission. Leveraging science, insights and imagination, we provide solutions and contribute essential non-clinical services wherever care is delivered, to enhance patients’ and caregivers’ experience while improving our clients’ financial health. Sodexo Healthcare’s 35,000 employees provide human-centered care with food and nutrition, environmental and clinical engineering services that support healthcare teams and overall operations at over 1,500 sites in the United States.  
 

Sodexo North America is part of a global, Fortune 500 company with a presence in 72 countries. Sodexo is a leading provider of integrated food, facilities management and other services that enhance organizational performance, contribute to local communities and improve quality of life for millions of customers in corporate, education, healthcare, senior living, sports and leisure, government and other environments daily. The company employs 160,000 people at 13,000 sites in all 50 U.S. states and Canada, and indirectly supports tens of thousands of additional jobs through its annual purchases of $19 billion in goods and services from small to large businesses. Sodexo is committed to supporting diversity and inclusion and safety, while upholding the highest standards of corporate responsibility and ethical business conduct. In support of local communities across the U.S., in 2019, Sodexo contributed over 151,500 in volunteer hours, and since 1996, the Stop Hunger Foundation has contributed nearly $34.5 million to help feed children in America impacted by hunger. To learn more about Sodexo, visit us.sodexo.com, and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.  


Heidi Bullman
Sodexo
Heidi.Bullman@sodexo.com