The Rise of UNCH Dining

Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Buzalka

Booming retail growth and patient satisfaction scores make the University of North Carolina Hospitals a program to watch.

UNCH Food/ Nutrition Director Angelo Mojica shows some of the items for sale at the venue’s weekly famers market.

Alex Maness Photography

FAST FACTS

Name: University of North Carolina Hospitals

Staff: 7,000

Beds: 800

Avg. Daily Census: 90%

Retail outlets: 2

Annual Retail Sales: $6.8 million

Angelo Mojica is a man on a mission. The director of food and nutrition services for the multi-complex University of North Carolina Hospitals came to the institution three and a half years ago determined to change the way in-house dining is handled. His goals: to increase patient satisfaction, deliver solid financials and develop a stronger retail focus.

So far so good. Patient satisfaction scores have rocketed from the low single digits when he first started to the 76th percentile today, retail revenues are up 50 percent in the past year and department employee satisfaction is now leading all other in-house service departments.

Mojica is one of those high-energy, can't-get-the-words-out-fast-enough directors who exudes confidence and seems to have ideas to burn. He is a voracious learner who joined management company Morrison Management Services earlier in his career partly because the company had an opening in Rhode Island. That allowed him to enroll at Johnson & Wales University and earn a culinary degree.

“I didn't like chefs snowing me about what they were doing, so I decided to learn more about the science of food for myself,” he explains.

The CEC he earned at J&W joins the RD he earned as an undergraduate. Mojica also holds a masters in public health from UNC and is a licensed nursing home administrator. Mojica puts the graduate degree to use as an associate professor in UNC's School of Public Health, where he says he enjoys augmenting the theory he teaches with some practical lessons learned from his experiences as a director.

“Becoming director at UNC Hospitals was literally the job I always wanted,” says the native of Brooklyn, NY. “I fell in love with the place when I came here for graduate school.”

Setting Priorities

Ryan Miller, associate director for retail services

Mojica began his tenure as director in February 2005 determined to make significant changes in all three major areas of UNCH's foodservice operations: patient dining, catering and retail dining.

At the time, the UNCH dining program emphasized efficiency and cost containment. According to Mojica, patient dining revolved around a traditional trayline operation that assembled meals using mainly frozen and prepackaged components. The meals themselves were all designed to meet the standards for low-sodium and low-fat diets even if the patient was cleared for a standard diet.

Retail operations were outsourced to local operators and national brands while catering used excess production from the trayline to meet everyday obligations. For more elaborate events, outside caterers were engaged.

UNCH is a rapidly expanding institution that in the next year will add about a hundred additional beds to its core group of four facilities. It has also embarked on a major project to build a new cancer hospital, scheduled to open in 2009, that would add more beds.

Given that, Mojica felt it could financially support changes in the program that would lead to greater patient satisfaction and increased retail sales.

New Focus on Patient Satisfaction

BLACK HAT CHEFS. One of UNCH’s most successful employee satisfaction programs is the Black Hat Chefs initiative in which cooks progress through increasingly intricate culinary training to earn the right to wear the embroidered Black Hat Chef jacket. To date, over 20 cooks have enrolled and in that time, only one has left the department.

“To upgrade patient dining, we started with small things.” Mojica recalls, “things like making better macaroni and cheese and making Kaiser rolls fresh instead of buying burger buns.”

In addition to the food upgrades, Mojica also upgraded the coffee served to patients, switching to Starbucks branded brew on patient trays. Mojica says UNCH is the only acute care hospital in the Southeast that does this, though the initiative has not been problem-free. Since Starbucks doesn't make logoed sleeves for the 8-oz. cups used at UNCH, Mojica was forced to use generic sleeves that obscure the prized Starbucks logo until recently finding a transparent alternative that lets patients see the product name.

The first really big change, however, took about two years, as Mojica overhauled the patient menu to end the focus on universal modified meals.

“Most patients are on regular diets,” says Mojica. “Making every patient eat meals low in fat and sodium is not necessary.”