Empowering Healthy Eating with Insight and Discovery
A Healthy Guide in Every Pocket
Dining out while maintaining a healthy lifestyle can feel like navigating a maze of uncertainty. Where can you find nutritious meals? What do those menu items really contain? For many, it’s a daily challenge that undermines wellness goals.
Ochsner Health recognized this widespread struggle and sought to transform how their community accesses and understands nutritional information. The result? Eat Fit, a mobile app that puts expert dietary guidance, healthy restaurant recommendations, and powerful nutritional tools directly into the hands of users.
A Critical Health Resource Undermined
For over a decade, Eat Fit has been a cornerstone of Ochsner’s health-focused community outreach. Developed by registered dietitians, the app helped users identify healthy options at participating restaurants across Louisiana. But when their original vendor discontinued support, the application quickly degraded and became unreliable and nearly unusable.
Ochsner faced a mission-critical decision: rebuild the app from the ground up to regain control over their data, eliminate vendor dependency, and position the program for long-term growth.
Rebuilding for Control, Stability, and Growth
Ochsner partnered with Phase2 to rebuild the Eat Fit app. Not just to restore its original functionality, but to elevate the platform and ensure its sustainability.
Phase2 developed a cross-platform mobile application using React Native, paired with a powerful backend built on RedwoodJS. This architecture delivered a flexible and scalable system, granting Ochsner full ownership of their data and codebase.
A User-Centric Experience
The rebuilt Eat Fit app prioritizes user engagement through intuitive design and robust functionality:
- Restaurant Discovery with Geolocation: Users can locate nearby Eat Fit-approved restaurants, view detailed menus, and filter by dietary preferences or location.
- Detailed Nutritional Analysis: Recipes and dishes are supported by a powerful nutritional engine that calculates values, integrates with the USDA food database, and supports custom “prep recipes” used as ingredients in other meals.
- Rich Content & Community Resources: The app offers shopping guides, wellness event listings, and educational content. It is all managed directly by Ochsner’s non-technical team through a custom admin interface.
Operational Control with No Developer Bottlenecks
One of the most transformative features of the new platform is the custom administrative interface. This backend allows registered dietitians and other non-technical staff to:
- Add and manage restaurant partners and dishes
- Analyze and publish new recipes
- Update home screen promotions
- Make content changes instantly
The backend also includes visual compliance checks for Eat Fit nutritional guidelines, ensuring consistency and quality across the platform.
Phase2 took the time to really understand our nutrition-focused, nonprofit goals, helping us to prioritize features. The relaunch hit every milestone and the finished product is even more intuitive and easier for our community to navigate. When questions or issues arise, Phase2 is on it immediately. I wholeheartedly recommend them to any organization looking for a long-term app development partner.
Built for the Future
Phase2 didn’t stop at the launch. They established a long-term support program that includes:
- Ongoing security updates and performance maintenance
- A structured backlog for iterative feature enhancements
- Ad-hoc development services for innovation and expansion
Recent upgrades have included:
- Social sharing features
Appointment scheduling links to health providers - User ability to suggest new restaurants
- Enhanced filtering and recipe organization
Empowered Users, Sustainable Platform, Community Impact
The revitalized Eat Fit app is more than a technology solution, it's a public health asset. Ochsner now delivers a stable, extensible, and user-friendly tool that empowers individuals to make smarter food choices on the go.
Internally, Ochsner now benefits from a flexible, easy-to-manage platform that empowers their team to continuously evolve the app, expand their nutritional programming, and respond quickly to community needs, all without the delays or limitations of a rigid development cycle.
About Ochsner Health
Ochsner Health is the leading nonprofit healthcare provider in the Gulf South, delivering expert care at its 46 hospitals and more than 370 health and urgent care centers. For 13 consecutive years, U.S. News & World Report has recognized Ochsner as the No. 1 hospital in Louisiana. Additionally, Ochsner Children’s has been recognized as the No. 1 hospital for kids in Louisiana for four consecutive years.
Ochsner inspires healthier lives and stronger communities through a combination of standard-setting expertise, quality and connection not found anywhere else in the region. In 2023, Ochsner Health cared for more than 1.5 million people from every state in the nation and 65 countries. Ochsner’s workforce includes more than 38,000 dedicated team members and over 4,700 employed and affiliated physicians.
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