Medical legal partnership: Taking the relationship to the next level

Medical legal partnerships with Federally Qualified Health Centers are becoming more common across the country, allowing health centers to work closely with lawyers to address upstream social determinants of health. Philadelphia’s Project HOME and Legal Clinic for the Disabled have operated a medical legal partnership for nearly two years. We will present the overall benefits and reasons for a medical legal partnership, the process of forming a medical legal partnership, and our successes in doing so. With a special focus, the health center identifies those at risk of sub-standard housing using some citywide data, and trains providers to proactively ask individuals who come from these identified hotspots about their housing conditions (especially those with pulmonary conditions or other health issues affected by poor housing). These patients are referred to the MLP and to community health workers. The MLP personnel and CHWs to work together to follow up on housing conditions, tenancy status, and related issues, with the ultimate goal of tracking impact on health (whether it's visits to the ER, decreased nebulizer/inhaler use, or some other health metric) and quality of life. The goal of this workshop is to show how using different disciplines to work together can create major shifts in our patients’ health.