Published July 24, 2025
To hear Dawn Kirk and Jaye Delvecchio ponder menu items and share a few laughs, a listener might assume they were good friends preparing to order dinner at a favorite restaurant.
Kirk, though, is one of L+M’s food service ambassadors, and Delvecchio was a recent hospital patient. What brought them together was the rollout of L+M’s “bedside ordering,” a more efficient and personalized method of helping patients get their daily meals.
L+M is the final Yale New Haven Health hospital to convert to bedside ordering, and the rollout was a huge success, according to all involved.
“We’re absolutely thrilled with the L+M rollout and how smoothly it went,” said Nicole Guillory, a system director of Food and Nutrition with Sodexo. “The L+M team did a great job.”
Previously, patients phoned in food orders. An ambassador like Kirk would take the order, confirm that it complied with the patient’s medical plan, and send it to the kitchen for preparation and delivery. Since orders were always coming in from different units, staff delivering the meals would have to roll their tray carts (also called trucks) to multiple units, sometimes for just a couple of orders.
With bedside ordering, food service ambassadors go room to room on one unit at a time; those orders are placed together and, when ready, delivered together. The units are served in a regular order so timing between meals is appropriate for the patients.
“This is a huge timesaver for our tray passers,” said Andrew Zalisk, L+M Food and Nutrition manager. “Now, when the food delivery trucks go out – and 10 trays fit in a truck – all those trays go to one unit.”
Food delivery times are nine minutes faster on average, dropping from an average of 45 minutes to 36 minutes, Zalisk said. “It’s definitely a big improvement.”
What if a patient is admitted after an ambassador has taken the orders on that unit? “We’ve built in times in the middle and the end of the line when we’ll do late trays to ensure we get meals to patients we might have missed,” Zalisk said, “but our goal is to keep as many trays on schedule as possible.”
To get each morning off to an efficient start, food ambassadors, when taking each patient’s dinner order, also take their breakfast order for the next day. And that brings us back to the bedside, with Kirk and patients like Delvecchio.
“The face-to-face interaction with patients – and seeing the same face perhaps a few days in a row – it’s a real patient satisfier,” Zalisk said. “And that’s because ambassadors like Dawn are so engaging and friendly. They truly are ambassadors for the hospital.”
“I love it,” Kirk added. “The patients are just wonderful to talk with, and I love helping them figure out what to have. A decent meal in the hospital is often a person’s favorite part of the day, and we’re helping them make smart, healthy choices in a more personal way.”
