Reaffirming our commitment to oral health in rural America

As rural stakeholders from around the country take time today to celebrate Nov. 16th as National Rural Health Day, DentaQuest reaffirms its commitment to improving the oral health of residents living in rural communities. DentaQuest Institute and DentaQuest Foundation have been involved in multiple activities and initiatives in recent years that help to improve oral health access and quality of oral health care for our nation’s rural residents. 

A few of the highlights include:

• The Institute’s Medical Oral Expanded Care (MORE Care) Initiative, which focuses on the integration of oral health care into the rural primary care practice as well as the development of coordinated care networks with community dental providers, has assisted more than 20 rural primary care practices and dental providers in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Based on learnings from the MORE Care initiatives in the three states, several publications were created to spread resources and knowledge to other rural communities interested in creating rural interprofessional oral health networks.
• White Paper -  “MORE Care: Narrowing the Rural Interprofessional Oral Health Gap” https://www.dentaquestinstitute.org/rural-ipp

• Rural Practice Guide – Released today – that provides practice-level guidance and practical how-to tips for rural health clinics interested in creating interprofessional oral health networks in their community: http://bit.ly/2AQ0LmR 
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• The Foundation’s support of the National Rural Health Association has enabled community health workers and other providers in Texas to be trained to integrate oral health into their outreach to residents living in colonias, Hispanic-populated communities along the U.S.-Mexico border.

• DentaQuest Foundation grantee National Conference of State Legislatures is educating policymakers on issues that challenge rural communities in their access to oral health care, developing and publishing resources that can be found on their website, here.

• Lastly, we’ve been proud to see some of our rural oral health leaders featured in The Journal of Rural Health and also NRHA’s Compendium of Rural Oral Health Best Practices.

For more information on these and other great projects being led by our Institute and Foundation teams, please visit the websites at www.dentaquestinstitute.org and www.dentaquestfoundation.org. You can also sign up for Socious, our Foundation’s online collaborative platform, to access resources and tools generated by our grantees and partners. Register here: www.oralhealth.network

DentaQuest Institute Releases New Report on Interprofessional Care in Rural Communities

New white paper delves into the role of interprofessional networks to coordinate person-centered care and improve oral health

DentaQuest Institute, in collaboration with the South Carolina Office of Rural Health, the Medical University of South Carolina, the Colorado Rural Health Center, and the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health, just released a new white paper , MORE Care: Narrowing the Rural Interprofessional Oral Health Care Gap. The report highlights the importance of interprofessional oral health networks in achieving person-centered care and population health improvement. By producing coordinated care pathways between dental medicine and primary and behavioral health, interprofessional oral health networks have the potential to improve patient outcomes, increase patient and provider satisfaction, and reduce the cost of providing and receiving care.

The report is the result of two years of collective findings from the Medical Oral Expanded Care (MORE Care) Initiative involving twenty-one Rural Health Clinics and fifteen rural dental care partners located in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. MORE Care partners provide insight into the main factors affecting the initiation of interprofessional oral health practice observed during the early phases of MORE Care.

The white paper, and a soon-to-be-released implementation guide, offer insight into the needs of Rural Health Clinics and rural dental care teams as they undertook the creation of interprofessional oral health networks (IPOHNs). In addition to creating interprofessional oral health networks, the purpose of MORE Care is to serve as a vehicle for adopting system change in the rural communities.

For more information on how dental programs serving rural communities can leverage MORE Care, contact Rebekah Mathews, director of transformation at rebekah.mathews@improvingoralhealth.com.