Wednesday, April 25, 2018
When Javana Bradford took her one-month old daughter, Augyst, for a checkup at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, pediatrician Melissa Klein asked if she and her daughter were getting enough to eat. Ms. Bradford said she was having trouble adding Augyst to her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, commonly known as food stamps. Dr. Klein referred her to Deanna White, a paralegal at the hospital’s medical-legal partnership with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. That referral led to policy changes that helped hundreds of families enroll newborns months earlier than before, which translates to real money for child nutrition....Read More
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
When children on ventilators were unable to leave the hospital due to a home-nursing shortage caused by low Medicaid reimbursement rates, the medical-legal partnership at Seattle Children’s sued the state Medicaid Director and the Director of the Healthcare Authority to help kids return home. They then turned their attention to advocacy with the state agencies to fix the reimbursement rates....Read More
Monday, April 2, 2018
In the rule for the 2018 performance year of the Quality Payment Program, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services included “screening for health-harming legal needs” as a recognized Improvement Activity (IA) under Medicare’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System. Now eligible clinicians who screen patients for legal needs will receive credit in the IA category, which could potentially lead to an increased Medicare reimbursement rate. This new primer from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership discusses which clinicians are eligible for the Quality Payment Program, how to claim credit for Improvement Activities, and the inherent opportunities for medical-legal partnerships....Read More
Monday, March 5, 2018
This article shares how medical-legal partnerships help treat issues that drive health inequities. The authors identify multiple models for delivering medical-legal partnership services in clinical settings, and examined how health care organizations adapt the intervention to best meet the specific needs of its patients. While the models of delivery vary, the paper's authors also identified eight core elements that define the intervention, and offer recommendations to bring these partnerships to scale....Read More
