Friday, April 5, 2019

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

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. ...Read More

Monday, September 10, 2018

Medical-legal partnership origin story: People’s Community Clinic in Austin

This medical-legal partnership origin story traces the Austin team's planning process, how the nuts and bolts of the partnership came together, and how it's expanded over time. Through interviews with more than a dozen front-line staff and administrators, the story also looks at how legal services fit in the health center's broader social determinants of health strategy. Partners at People's and Texas Legal Services Center share why they think the real value of medical-legal partnership is in using legal expertise to inform clinical processes so that the health center is as safe and empowering a place for patients to receive care as possible....Read More

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Patients-to-policy story: Ensuring people with chronic conditions maintain access to care

Whitman-Walker Health's medical-legal partnership helped prevent platinum insurance plans that were widely used by patients with chronic illnesses from being eliminated in the D.C. Marketplace. Through advocacy with the insurance commissioner and insurance companies, thousands of patients maintained access to care....Read More

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Patients-to-policy story: Increasing nutritional supports for newborns

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