Organizational Ethics: Meeting Patients' Needs Through Medical-Legal Partnership: What Does It Take?
Channel: HMS Center for Bioethics
Date: 2023-03-31

When patients' health suffers from social factors such as food and housing insecurity, limited health benefits, or an uncertain immigration status, what are hospitals and health care providers to do? One proven solution is for the hospital to connect impacted patients to effective legal assistance, to help patients secure remedies for social determinants of health available through civil law. This innovative model, known as a medical-legal partnership (MLP), is beginning to take root across the USA – but what does it take for it to become the norm? Why do hospitals decide to adopt MLPs and what role can ethics play?

Join Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and its partner Health Law Advocates as organizational leaders describe how and why they are partnering together on their MLP and take us through the ethical and strategic choices they are making along the way. We will also hear from representatives of other MLP providers in Boston. Together we will consider learnings for extending MLPs to vulnerable patients everywhere.

Presenters:
- Sarah Boonin, JD
Associate Dean for Experiential Learning, Director of Clinical Programs,
Director of Health Law Clinic, Suffolk University Law School

- Andrew P. Cohen, JD, MA
Director and Lead Attorney, Access to Care and Coverage Team,
Health Law Advocates
- Nancy I. Kasen, MSc
Vice President, Community Benefits & Community Relations,
Beth Israel Lahey Health

- Yoni Levy, JD
Partner, Ropes & Gray LLP

- David N. Sontag, JD, MBE, HEC-C
Senior Associate General Counsel and Director of Ethics, Beth Israel Lahey Health;
Co-Chair, Ethics Advisory Committee, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center;
Lecturer on Medicine, Part-Time, Harvard Medical School

Commentator:
- Ellen Lawton, JD
Senior Fellow, Health Begins

Moderators:
- Charlotte H. Harrison, PhD, JD, MPH, HEC-C
Co-Chair, Organizational Ethics Consortium
Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School
Immediate Past Hospital Ethicist and Director, Office of Ethics
Boston Children’s Hospital

- Kelsey N. Berry, PhD
Associate Faculty Director, Master of Science in Bioethics Degree Program
Lecturer, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School