You Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

Ellen Lawton, Esq.
Executive Director, National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership

Medical-legal partnership teams spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of data to collect -- from patients, from each other, and from the records.

MLP research and evaluation activities constitute a rapidly expanding landscape that challenge academics and practitioners by refusing to yield simple solutions to simple questions. I guess things just aren't that simple when you try to meld two distinct disciplines, namely law and medicine. Three, if you count public health.

So when I detect a simple truth amid all the murky conversations about data, I want to shout it from the rooftop. I will settle for writing it here, and it is this: legal aid intake forms ought to require client information about their health care providers as part of every intake -- and not just for the MLP cases. Legal aid attorneys should understand where their clients get -- or should get -- primary and specialty care, and get to know the local hospitals or health centers that serve clients. This is going to have an impact whether your practice is SSI, housing or consumer law -- since each of those areas might send you scurrying for medical records or a physician's letter.

If every legal aid office collected data on where their clients get health care, they would know immediately who their medical counterparts are in the community. In some cases, it might help raise legal aid's profile as a community responder in synch with health care providers. Sure, there are legal aid offices that are watchdogs of the health care community. But the greater number -- many folks across the legal aid community in the US -- draw a blank when I ask if they know exactly where their clients get health care. And that's too bad, because our medical counterparts -- MLP and non-MLP alike -- deserve to know what a tremendous amount of amazing, quality advocacy is happening just down the street, on behalf of their patients. It's our job to tell them, loud and clear!