Showcase Presenter: National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health

Showcase Title:

NIIOH Tools and Resources to Support Integration of Oral Health in Primary Care

Presentation:

NIIOH Tools and Resources to Support Integration of Oral Health in Primary Care

Presenter Bios:

Marcia Brand, PhD

Executive Director, National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health (NIIOH)
Senior Advisor, Dentaquest Foundation

Marcia K. Brand, Ph.D. is a Senior Advisor to the Dentaquest Foundation and the Executive Director of the National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health. She has held a number of leadership positions in the Federal government and academics and currently serves as a consultant and advisor on matters related to access to oral and rural health care. From 2009 until 2015, Dr. Brand was the Deputy Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an Agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services that works to fill in the gaps for people who live outside the economic and medical mainstream. She held other leadership positions within HRSA, including associate administrator for the Bureau of Health professions and the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy. Ms. Brand worked in the US Senate as a legislative assistant, and held academic appointments in the dental hygiene departments at Thomas Jefferson University and Old Dominion University. She earned a doctoral degree in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania, and both master's and bachelor's degrees in dental hygiene from Old Dominion University.

Content Description:

The National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health (NIIOH) is a consortium of funders and health professionals who share a vision that dental disease can be eradicated. The mission of the NIIOH is to engage primary care clinicians to be:

knowledgeable about the links between oral health and overall health
alert to their patients’ oral health needs
ready and willing to deliver oral health screening and preventive services to patients of all ages
effective at partnering with dental specialists and the larger health care team to support patient and community oral health

The NIIOH is a systems change initiative focused on transforming education and delivery systems that support primary care clinicians from disciplines including Family Medicine, Pediatrics, Nursing, Physician Assistant, OB/GYN, and Internal Medicine.

Tools and resources to review in depth include:

Smiles for Life, a national oral health curriculum presented via eight modules that teach oral health across the lifespan and provides free continuing education credit for seven types of health professionals. Smiles for Life builds common knowledge, skills, and attitudes and includes specific instruction in team-based, interprofessional care. This curriculum has been endorsed by 18 professional organizations, covering seven health professions. Smiles for Life has been widely adopted, with over half a million discrete visitors to the site since its publication in 2010. A new resource developed for Smiles for Life is a free mobile app to support clinical decision-making. Recent results from the first Smiles for Life User Survey, designed to measure the impact that course completion has on practice, demonstrate that Smiles for Life positively influences practice. The majority of respondents indicated that since taking the courses, they have either started or improved a variety of oral health activities such as conducting an oral health risk assessment, application of fluoride varnish, and referral to dentistry.
Oral Health: An Essential Component of Primary Care, a white paper that makes the case for incorporating preventive oral healthcare as a component of routine medical care and structuring referrals to dentistry. The Oral Health Delivery Framework is a conceptual model that provides a practical method for primary care teams of all types to engage patients and families in the prevention and early detection of oral disease. The 5 components of the Framework are Ask, Look, Decide, Act, and Document. Along with describing the components of the Framework, the white paper builds the case for change, discusses why primary care is the right setting to address preventive oral health, and puts forth a call to action for various stakeholders to support the integration of oral health into primary care. The White Paper has been formally endorsed or supported by 21 professional organizations including the AAP and AAFP.
A preview of the Oral Health Integration Implementation Guide and Toolkit, to be published in Fall 2016. This resource builds upon the white paper and the field-testing experiences of 19 diverse primary care sites around the country. Providing narrative practical how-to guidance to primary care teams interested in integrating oral health, the Implementation Guide also includes tools used and tested by the field-testing sites, as well as case examples and impact data from their experiences. Tools include sample referral forms to be used by primary care and dentistry, a data reporting tracking tool to monitor integration progress, sample workflows, clinical content training presentations, oral health patient education resources, and more.

Some additional tools that will be shared include:

Interprofessional Oral Health Faculty Toolkit
Interprofessional Faculty Facilitator’s Manual
Webinars integrating oral health and overall health
Oral Health Literacy Products

These tools are designed to motivate and facilitate the integration of oral health into primary care, ensuring that practitioners at every stage of their work, from student to experienced, and in every primary care setting, can engage in preventive oral healthcare and improve the oral health and overall health of their patients.

Learner Objectives:

Understand the range of tools available to support oral health integration and the scope of activities that can be done in the primary care setting to improve oral health.
Identify opportunities to leverage the available tools developed by the NIIOH to create change in an educational or practice setting.