Posted May 5, 20148:13 am
Dr. E. Harry Walker was named a "Health Care Hero" by Crain's Cleveland Business. Click here to see the full article!
Dr. E. Harry Walker is the Interim Associate Chief Operating Officer for The MetroHealth System and Executive Director of Primary Care with the Patient Care Unit. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is a native Clevelander, attending John Adams High School and completing his residency and internship and Mt. Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.
Dr. Walker believes in holistic treatment and preventative medical care. In that regard, he is a close partner with The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and a special partnership Legal Aid has with The MetroHealth System.
MetroHealth and Legal Aid collaborate through the Community Advocacy Program. This medical-legal partnership pairs legal and medical professionals to improve community health. Medical staff from MetroHealth collaborate with lawyers from Legal Aid to overcome legal barriers to patient health focusing on five vulnerable populations in Cuyahoga County: families, elderly, immigrants, pregnant women, and formerly incarcerated. The Legal Aid/MetroHealth Community Advocacy Program was the first of its kind in Ohio, and the fifth in the nation.
Here is an example of how the Community Advocacy Program works: A MetroHealth physician refers a patient to a Legal Aid attorney who works on-site at MetroHealth. The Legal Aid attorney is part of the medical team, and receives physician referrals through the electronic medical records. The patient had tried twice to obtain Social Security disability (SSI) benefits for her daughter but failed. The daughter is a smart, vivacious 5-year-old. She was doing well academically in kindergarten, but had a debilitating seizure that changed everything. She was diagnosed as epileptic and has experienced significant developmental delays as a result of her diagnosis. Because of these delays, she repeated kindergarten for a second time and now must attend school with a nurse because of her medical condition. Legal Aid – with evidence provided by the physician - helped the mom and now the family receives ongoing, monthly SSI benefits to help cover the costs of the daughter’s care. The family also received a significant back payment of disability benefits. Today, the daughter’s epilepsy is well-controlled through medication and additional SSI benefits will help her obtain further help including regular counseling and speech therapy so that she can continue to find success in school and have a bright future.
Dr. Walker is the Community Advocacy Program’s medical champion: he helped create this program with Legal Aid and led its expansion over the last 10 years to help low-income people overcome social or legal barriers to health. His passion for community health has been pivotal for the program’s development, making the Community Advocacy Program a model medical-legal partnership that others strive to achieve. Initially, Legal Aid was only at MetroHealth’s main campus - Dr. Walker was instrumental in leading the charge for expansion of Legal Aid’s services into the MetroHealth community health centers at Broadway, Buckeye, and McCafferty. Now, more people in the community who are low income, at-risk and vulnerable are receiving valuable and life-saving services from MetroHealth’s medical professionals and Legal Aid’s attorneys.
Dr. Walker is also the key developer of the Community Advocacy Program’s ReEntry Clinic at the Broadway Health Center, providing health care and legal services to formerly incarcerated persons. He spearheaded the development of this clinic and also acted as the primary physician for these patients. The formerly incarcerated often face chronic health conditions, needing primary and specialty medical care – Dr. Walker expertly provided this medical care and acted as their advocate. Patients attend scheduled appointments, utilize free or reduced medication programs and have key testing completed as appropriate for their medical conditions. Since the Clinic’s inception, more than 1000 formerly incarcerated persons with chronic medical conditions have utilized these services.
Approaching comprehensive patient health holistically is another of Dr. Walker’s inspirational qualities. He has an acute awareness that the patient with recurring complaints of asthma may be living in substandard housing – if the housing issue can be solved through the legal system than it is likely the patient’s health will improve. This improved health translates into less doctor and emergency room visits and improvements in living conditions. These results mean the overall health of the community improves.
Because of Dr. Walker’s leadership and advocacy, the innovative Legal Aid/MetroHealth partnership has impacted thousands of low-income people in Cuyahoga County:
- More than 5000 people have been helped through the Community Advocacy Program since its inception;
- MetroHealth medical staff and Legal Aid attorneys engage in work to change systems through advocacy at the institutional, city, county and state levels;
- Legal Aid attorneys provided training to hundreds of medical providers in legal matters related to social determinants of health; and
- Legal Aid attorneys developed readily available easy-to-use tools for medical providers to directly solve barriers to education, public benefits, utilities and more.
Dr. Walker advocates tirelessly for Legal Aid to part of a patient’s medical home – meaning that everyone treating the patient is in communication about the patient’s needs, and that patient is treated holistically. Achieving and maintaining good health involves more than just finding a good doctor. For many of Cleveland’s low income residents, problems such as poor housing, domestic violence, little access to healthy food, and lack of health insurance create barriers to health. Through this evolving landscape of the medical-legal partnership, Dr. Walker ensures the MetroHealth/Legal Aid partnership remains viable and successful by including Legal Aid in the medical home concept.