Tag: legal health checkup

Legal screeners and intake for medical providers

Post author By Margaret
Post date June 28, 2016
No Comments on Legal screeners and intake for medical providers

Mobile apps aimed at non-legal service providers help them screen for legal problems for their clients.

For example there is an app specifically designed for use in medical-legal partnerships, in which users have come to a medical facility to deal with a medical problem.

The app can be used by a service provider at the clinic or hospital to screen the patient for legal issues that might be going on, and perhaps related to the health issues.

This type of software is beneficial because it provides expert knowledge and an easy-to-use fashion and it can streamline the screening process especially for those who are not experts in law.

Example of such a mobile app screener: from the Legal Aid Society of Louisville,

Legal Aid Society of Louisville (LAS) leveraged mobile technologies to develop a legal assessment tool for medical/legal partnerships that effectively screens low‐income patients for legal problems and alerts medical professionals of the need to refer patients to a legal partner for timely assistance. The “Law and Health Screening Tool” consists of an iPad application and a companion web-based survey system. It has been successfully piloted at the University of Louisville Pediatrics Children and Youth Clinic, a high-traffic urban clinic with a high poverty, diverse patient population.

The tool has four main functions:

A “law and health survey,” which parents/guardians of patients complete using a tablet. This is a quick legal screen meant to be easily completed by parents while waiting to be seen at the clinic. The survey uses question branching, so that the response to one question determines the next question posed.

An “alert” function, which electronically notifies MLP staff when a survey response indicates a possible health-related legal need. MLP staff may then retrieve contact information from the administrative website for follow-up.

A “resource” function, whereby a “yes” response to certain questions triggers an offer of a relevant resource, such as information about utility assistance, foreclosure prevention services or free tax-preparation assistance and the earned income tax credit.

A data collection and reporting function, which aggregates survey answers for reporting and monitoring purposes. These metrics provide insight into the legal needs of the clinic’s patient population and how MLP resources might be tailored to address them effectively.

The final report from LSC-TIG is here: TIG 11094: LAS Medical Legal Partnership App

Tags access to justice innovation, law health survey, legal health checkup, legal intake, legal tech, legal triage, medical legal partnerships

Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Legal Health Checkup concept sketch

Post author By Margaret
Post date June 28, 2016
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An increasingly popular concept for access innovations is the Legal Health Checkup, that would serve as an initial outreach to laypeople. It would help them understand what issues they are currently dealing with that might have legal recourse — and then would give them resources to follow up on this.

For checkups, I’ve observed three types:

ones for a specific problem
ones for a specific type of person (of a certain age, profession, family situation, nationality)
ones that are generic for everyone

They can be administered online, through surveys, bots or checklists. Or they could be done at work, at a church/synagogue/mosque, at a school, or another community institution.

There are some existing checkups, like one in Ontario. One concept idea is for a checkup is more mobile and resourceful than the current models. Here are some sketched notes exploring how there could be a richer type of checklist, with better:

outreach touchpoints
technology delivery
takeaways given after the checkup is done

Tags access to justice innovations, concept ideas for legal services, legal health checkup, legal help outreach, screening for legal issues

Current Projects Triage and Diagnosis

Legal Health Check-ups online screener, from CLEO in Ontario

Post author By Margaret
Post date June 28, 2016
1 Comment on Legal Health Check-ups online screener, from CLEO in Ontario

There is a lot of interest in developing new, and new modes of, legal health checkups. There are some such checkups currently in action — like this one from Ontario, which is delivered through a web survey.

This one, created by Halton Community Legal Services, is specifically for low-income individuals in Ontario to figure out what benefits and services they could receive to deal with their problems.

Many people do not think of their everyday problems as being “legal problems” and do not know that they can get help. People living in poverty are more likely to report multiple problems such as bad health, unemployment, low income, poor housing and family breakdown.

Halton Community Legal Services has created this check-up to help people who are living in poverty so they can identify legal problems and get help.

I got word of this checkup, after an earlier post on Legal Health checkups. Kristina Brousalis who works at CLEO, a public legal education and information organization in Toronto, Ontario, sent me a link to the Canadian online health checkup site, that serves consumers in Ontario.

The site asks some questions to get a profile of the user, and then connects them with possible help & understanding of what next steps could be.

It is an interesting model of intake & of public education. It can be an activation experience, to get people to start thinking of what problems in their life have a legal component — and a possible legal solution. After going through the questions, the site provides some path to follow up & get possible problems taken care of. Presumably, it also is able to send on the user’s profile to a legal clinic, for a relatively warm hand-off to the service provider.

I love to see new models of intake & activation. I was recently speaking with my colleague Briane Cornish about how to set up a pop-up legal activation — getting legal checklists, education materials, and risk profiles out into the community. I want to experiment with how we can devolve legal resources out of courthouses & self-help centers, and into the communities day-to-day locations. Like in Costcos, train stations, schools, libraries, and other public touchpoints.

One of the ideas that Briane had was to to have a checklist for different age ranges. The user would be asked the checklist of questions, and then be given a personalized legal risk profile. From there, we could possibly give them contact details for legal services and self-help centers — or well-designed paper-based resources to help them understand what processes and resources are available to them.

Online models, like the Canadian health check-up site, are another way of devolving intake. The open question is how many people will end up on the website. I would love to see a combination of online & in-person *Legal Activation* experiences.

Here are some screenshots of the Canadian checkup site, to get a sense of the experience:

Tags access to justice innovation, issue spotting, legal health checkup, legal services innovations, legal triage, Ontario

Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Google Legal Health Checkup, for privacy

Post author By Margaret
Post date August 21, 2015
No Comments on Google Legal Health Checkup, for privacy

A few weeks ago, when I logged into my browser, I got a notice from Google that they wanted to walk me through a Privacy Checkup of my Google Account. I agreed, more to observe how they treated me as a user & how they guided me through the experience of understanding my status quo & revising my options to be more in line with my preferences.

This kind of intervention could be useful for privacy interventions — but also for other ‘legal health checkups’. I am curious about how to attract people to pay more attention to possible legal remedies for their ‘life problems’ and then seek out help from lawyers, guides, software, etc. that could guide them towards being prepared & smart about the law.

So what was the Google Privacy Check-up intervention like? Here are the screenshots from it:

Even if I had not been analyzing this experience as a designer, I would have clicked on & completed this privacy check-up. It was easy to use, and it gave me interesting information about me (and like most people, I expect, it’s really interesting to learn more about me — or the alternate version of me that Google has compiled). Most importantly, it gave me a sense of choice and agency — I was able to tell Google what I wanted (within reason) and have them do it. That is a very satisfying accomplishment for a few minutes of clicking.

What are the takeaways for this when it comes to access to justice?

We could be doing compelling legal health check-ups just as we do privacy check-ups. Here’s a skeleton of the process:

Reach out to the person, hopefully in a context (like the Google search) that relates to what you’re checking up on, so that they feel primed to engage on the topic
Give them insights into their own status quo — tell them something about themselves that they don’t already know, or that frames it in an interesting way. It’s almost like a Buzzfeed ‘which kind are you’ quiz. Or here, where Google tells you who they think you are & what your preferences are.
Tell them possible outcomes from their status quo. Give them a sense of what may come down the road — bad consequences, good ones, how they’ll be treated, what they’ll get — if they continue on with their current situation.
Provide action steps in which they can immediately change their status quo — whether it’s by setting goals/preferences, taking a step to resolve a problem, reaching out to someone else for hep. Embed easy follow-up action into this review, so that the person can immediately exert their agency (while they’re still thinking about it, and while their preferences & long-term thinking are at the forefront).

That kind of service design could help loop people into taking care of their legal health — whether it’s making an estate plan or dealing with housing, employment, or financial problems they’re having.

Tags Google privacy checkup, legal health checkup, legal intervention, privacy preferences