From left, Dennis S. Charney, MD; Allison Charney; Beth Essig; Mount Sinai Trustee Blaine V. Fogg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Legal Aid Society; and Sena Kim-Reuter.
The Mount Sinai Health System recently launched the Mount Sinai Medical-Legal Partnership, a nonprofit organization created to help address the needs of patients living in poverty.
“While we provide extraordinary health care, sometimes legal services are necessary, even critical, for our patients to get well and stay well,” Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, said at a kickoff event on Wednesday, April 26, at the Corporate Services Center, 150 E. 42nd Street. “That is why I am so proud of the mission of this partnership, which tracks so closely with the mission of Mount Sinai.”
The partnership was the idea of Beth Essig, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Mount Sinai Health System, who recruited two co-chairs: Bettina Plevan, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP, and Allison Charney, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, who proudly said that her father, Dr. Charney, was “all-in” from the start. Sena Kim-Reuter, President of the partnership, is an experienced litigator who has been recruiting pro bono lawyers and studying the best way to serve patients, with three projects under way:
- At the Center for Transgender Surgery and Medicine, lawyers are helping patients with a variety of issues, including changing their legal name and gender markers, and handling Medicaid and health insurance matters.
- At The Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, lawyers will help patients with standby guardianships of their children.
- At the Child and Family Institute at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, the Partnership and the Legal Aid Society were awarded a $1.3 million grant from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to hire two full-time attorneys and a part-time social worker for a three-year program to help patients get the special services they need in school.
The partnership also plans to work with pro bono legal services providers such as the New York Legal Assistance Group, the Legal Aid Society, and Youth Represents. “We have been very busy,” Ms. Kim-Reuter says, “but this is just the beginning.”