Maimonides Chief of Pediatric Community Health honored for her work to address social determinants of health
(Brooklyn, N.Y.)—On Monday, January 20, City and State New York recognized Dr. Yonit Lax, Chief of Pediatric Community Health at Maimonides Health, as a 2025 Trailblazers in Health Care for her commitment to treating children. During her time at Maimonides Health, Dr. Lax has created innovative programs that treat the “whole child,” going beyond traditional medical care to screen for and address the social, emotional, and development needs of more than 20,000 children. Among these programs are the Maimonides Maternal Child Health Community Advisory Board and Brooklyn Parenting Center, both of which expand access to integrated developmental, behavioral, and mental health services throughout Brooklyn.
The Community Advisory Board is a comprehensive network of more than a dozen community-based organizations, offering families essential social and behavioral support to families in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Parenting Center provides families with support from conception until age two—a critical period for brain development that can impact the child’s health throughout their entire life. Maternal-Child behavioral and mental health specialists screen families for social and behavioral needs from pregnancy through the child’s first thousand days of life and then connect families with resources, laying the foundation for lifelong health.
“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized on City and State’s 2025 Trailblazers in Health Care list,” said Dr. Lax, Chief of Pediatric Community Health at Maimonides Health. “I am so thankful to my clinical teams at Maimonides Health, the Community Advisory Board, and the Brooklyn Parenting Center for going above and beyond to treat the whole child by screening families for unmet needs. By working together, we ensure that families receive the resources that help them thrive.”
Dr. Lax implemented systems changes that created user friendly workflows in the electronic medical record to allow the medical team to write letters to patients’ landlords when their homes have unsafe living conditions. As a result, landlords have addressed issues of air quality in apartment buildings, significantly benefiting children with asthma, allergies or eczema.
“Being recognized by City and State as a 2025 Trailblazers in Health Care is a well-deserved honor for Dr. Lax,” said Dr. Jeffrey Avner, Chair of Pediatrics and Director of Maimonides Children’s Hospital. “Dr. Lax is a leader who recognizes the importance of not only treating the child’s current medical condition, but also the importance of identifying non-medical factors that affect a child’s overall health, with the hope of averting major health conditions in the future. This work is truly transformational.”
In her dual role as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and a provider at Maimonides, Dr. Lax educates students and practitioners on patient advocacy and social determinants of health both locally and nationally.
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Maimonides Health is Brooklyn’s largest healthcare system, serving over 320,000 patients each year through the system’s 3 hospitals, 1,800+ physicians and more than 80 community-based practices and outpatient centers. The system is anchored by Maimonides Medical Center, one of the nation’s largest independent teaching hospitals and home to centers of excellence in numerous specialties and Maimonides Midwood Community Hospital (formerly New York Community Hospital), a 130-bed adult medical-surgical hospital; and Maimonides Children’s Hospital, Brooklyn’s only children’s hospital and only pediatric trauma center.
Maimonides’ clinical programs rank among the best in the country for patient outcomes, including its Heart and Vascular Institute, Neurosciences Institute, Bone and Joint Center, and Cancer Center. For additional information, please visit www.maimo.org and follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.