Evaluating the efficacy of medical-legal partnerships that address social determinants of health

Background: Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) are health system–community partnerships composed of multidisciplinary teams designed to improve patient and community health. MLPs provide legal services to address health-harming legal needs that contribute to health inequities. Methods: A grant provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established the Accelerating Health Equity, Advancing through Discovery (AHEAD) Initiative to identify, evaluate, and disseminate community-based interventions that improve health equity. Three geographically and demographically diverse institutions were chosen to strengthen the evidence-base surrounding MLP by developing standardized evaluation tools in the areas of community health, health system savings, and learner outcomes. Results: The generalizable process leading to evaluation tool development is described herein, and includes the formation of multi-institutional teams, logic model development, and stakeholder interviews. Conclusions: Although MLP is presented, this process can be used by various types of community health partnerships to develop evaluation tools surrounding social determinants of health (SDOH).