Thursday, August 13, 2015
This article discusses how a medical-legal partnership can enhance a health care organization's ability to address the “six aims for improvement” identified by the Institute of Medicine’s report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the Twenty-first Century. The authors explain how a health care organization can incorporate medical-legal partnership quality indicators into their organization’s scorecard to increase productivity and performance....Read More
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Working within a medical-legal partnership, an urban hospital-based pediatric practice standardized criteria for providers approving medical need utility certification requests. Authors compared prior-year utility certification requests and approvals (pre-intervention) with the intervention year for families who reported energy insecurity on a waiting-room screening questionnaire. Between the first and second years of the study, certification of medical need approvals increased by 65 percent, preventing utility shut-offs for 396 more families with vulnerable children....Read More
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
In Worcester, Massachusetts, more than one in ten children suffers from asthma. Recently the city's civil legal aid organization, health care institutions, and the city Department of Public Health began using a multi-sector medical-legal partnership approach to address housing and clinical needs of high-risk asthma patients. This post on the Health Affairs blog describes that partnership and their early findings....Read More
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
A study at Boston Medical Center, a large urban safety-net hospital, incorporated medical-legal partnership services into an intervention for families of healthy newborns receiving primary care. Low-income families assigned to the intervention group were found to have an increase in use of preventive health care and had greater access to concrete supports....Read More
