Resources
We publish research, tools, and lessons learned to help healthcare and legal organizations build and operate medical-legal partnerships and to help funders and policymakers advance medical-legal partnership activities. You can search those resources in the library below.
The library also links to journal articles, authored both by National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership staff and MLP practitioners and researchers from the field, that highlight ways medical-legal partnerships have improved patient health and well-being, the healthcare workforce, and healthcare delivery. A list of these articles with summaries are also available on the Peer-Reviewed Research page.
Leveraging the Electronic Health Record to Link Health Center Patients with MLP Services
This issue brief provides concrete examples of how health centers in Iowa, Montana, and Texas are leveraging the electronic health record (EHR) to complement their screening for the social determinants of health as well as to increase their capacity to deliver targeted medical-legal partnership-related interventions.
The Role of Medical-Legal Partnerships for Socially Vulnerable Older Adults
This fact sheet looks at how integrating medical and legal services for older health center patients can help mitigate these challenges and begin to comprehensively address problems that directly impact a patient’s health and well-being. It examines how these partnerships work, and highlights two medical-legal partnership programs for seniors in San Francisco and Boston.
Leveraging Legal Services on the Homeless Patient Aligned Care Team
This brief highlights the potential for partnership between the legal community and Homeless Patient Aligned Care Teams (H-PACT) at Veterans Affairs medical centers. It profiles medical-legal partnerships that are successfully tackling the unmet legal needs of Veterans experiencing and at-risk of homelessness through this approach.
An Analysis of Washington Medical-Legal Partnership’s Financial Benefit to Seattle Children’s Hospital
This white paper examines three years (FY 2015-2017) of financial benefit to Seattle Children’s Hospital and its patients as a result of medical-legal partnership services. It looks at the costs avoided and revenue collected for the healthcare institution and patients as a result of MLP interventions, acknowledging the complex collaboration of many other hospital advocates in patient care.
Clinician Perceptions of Medical-Legal Partnerships: Lessons for Adopting Social Determinants of Health Interventions in Health Care Settings
Based on interviews with 40 clinicians in healthcare settings that offer vulnerable patients access to civil legal services, this white paper examines clinicians’ perceptions related to their role and preferences when it comes to addressing social determinants of health. Using medical-legal partnership as one promising intervention, the paper illustrates the features of the model that clinicians perceive to be most attractive and beneficial for patient care. Among the paper’s findings, clinicians reported feeling that legal services resolved patient issues efficiently and effectively, and that the co-location / accessibility of in-house legal services was one of the most valued aspects of the model.
Medical-Legal Partnerships Serving Veterans: History, Growth & Progress
This issue brief provides a look at the state of the Veterans Affairs (VA) medical-legal partnership (MLP) field, including why and how legal services have grown in VA Medical Centers, where VA MLPs are operating today, and considerations for the future.