Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center examined how local agencies that enforce housing policies can partner with the health care organizations to pinpoint potential clusters of high asthma morbidity. Article describes how integrated housing and health data revealed areas and patients at-risk for asthma-related emergency visits, providing opportunities to offer targeted interventions.

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.

A randomized control trial 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 support. The results were published in Pediatrics.