Leveraging the Electronic Health Record to Link Health Center Patients with MLP Services

Description

For health centers seeking to take action on health inequities experienced by their patients, the electronic health record (EHR) represents a largely untapped resource to link social determinants of health and health-harming legal needs, activate medical-legal partnership (MLP) interventions, and identify upstream solutions to concerning community trends. MLP-focused, structured data collection and sharing are needed to reduce inefficiencies in current data tracking, to decrease missed opportunities for legal needs screening, and to mitigate the difficulties in tracking patient health and other outcomes after MLP interventions are delivered. This issue brief provides concrete examples of how health centers in Iowa, Montana, and Texas are leveraging the EHR to complement their screening for the social determinants of health as well as to increase their capacity to deliver targeted MLP-related interventions.

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Author

• Mallory Curran, JD, Principal, Mallory Curran Consulting & Senior Advisor, National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership

This issue brief was published by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.

Acknowledgment

This project is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of an award totaling $625,000 with 0 percent financed with non-governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit HRSA.gov