UCHealth's Patient App was already part of the system's toolset — but utilization was low. Jenna and her team saw an opportunity: instead of having patients self-order, they would put the app directly in nurses' hands and turn meal ordering into a bedside workflow.

Working with clinical informaticists, the team imaged the Patient App onto nurses' iPhones so it was pre-loaded and ready to go. When a nurse enters a patient's room, they present a menu, take the order, and enter it on the spot — or batch-enter multiple orders at once through the web version for a selected delivery window. The order flows directly to the kitchen. No phone call. No call center. No delay.

The team also did the hard configuration work upfront: safety trays for patients requiring restricted utensils or containers were programmed directly into the system as compliant or non-compliant options. Allergen compliance was built in, with a specific workflow developed for handling Epic's free-text "other" allergy field — a known patient safety gap. Any patient with an unresolved "other" allergy is flagged as ineligible to order through the app until a nurse reviews and resolves the allergy in the record.