Abstract

Medical-legal partnerships (MLP) are inter-professional community collaborations among physicians, lawyers, healthcare providers, healthcare organizations, and other professionals. Medical-legal partnerships seek to improve health and address the social determinants of health by integrating lawyers and legal services into the daily practice of healthcare delivery. This article will demonstrate how medical-legal partnership enhances a healthcare organization’s ability to address the “six aims for improvement” identified by the Institute of Medicine’s report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the Twenty-first Century. In addition, by incorporating medical-legal partnership quality indicators into an organization’s scorecard, both the healthcare organization and the medical-legal partnership work in concert to reduce health disparities, and increase productivity and performance.