Brief: How health and legal orgs can share information within privacy framework

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

By Jane Hyatt Thorpe, Lara Cartwright-Smith, Elizabeth Gray, & Marie Mongeon National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership

In order to effectively facilitate patient access to the legal services that can ultimately improve health, it is critical that healthcare practitioners and legal service providers be able to share information. Medical-legal partnerships are designed to encourage and enable this communication, but the information privacy legal framework may still present obstacles, both real and perceived, to effective information sharing. This brief from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership discusses numerous opportunities to share information within the boundaries of that legal framework, and describes different consent models that are possible.