Case study: The NYC Health + Hospitals-LegalHealth medical-legal partnership

Thursday, April 4, 2019

By Joanna Theiss, Janelle Schrag, & Joel Teitelbaum — The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership and America's Essential Hospitals

Download the case study, "A System-Level Approach to Addressing Health-Harming Legal and Social Needs"

This case study delves into the inner-workings of the largest medical-legal partnership in the country between NYC Health + Hospitals and the LegalHealth division of the New York Legal Assistance Group. It illustrates both how the use of patient-facing legal services fits into the health system’s mission, and how LegalHealth structures a variety of legal clinics across the NYC Health + Hospitals system to meet the legal needs of many different types of marginalized patients. Lessons learned from this partnership serve as an example to other public or non-profit hospital systems that may be interested in incorporating legal services into a holistic strategy to address the health-harming social and other non-medical factors that affect their patients.