Maternal and Child Health—Improving Oral Health Integration Projects
Overview
Maternal and Child Health—Improving Oral Health Integration (MCH-IOHI) projects aim to advance the integration of preventive oral health care (POHC) into primary care to make POHC more accessible to infants, children, adolescents, and pregnant women, including those with special health care needs, who are at risk for poor oral health. Funding supports an MCH-IOHI alliance (alliance), to include key state stakeholders such as policy, practice, and public health leaders; health professionals; health care payers; and public health surveillance experts. The alliance is implementing a two-tier, state-level and local-level improvement approach that addresses three core functions:
- Policy and practice
- Education and outreach
- Data, analysis, and evaluation
The state-level approach aims to inform state policy and practice decisions that promote integrated POHC (e.g., decisions about Medicaid payment for oral health care, decisions about state practice acts pertaining to health professions); increase oral health literacy across the state using an organizational health-literacy approach; and enhance the state’s oral-health-surveillance activities (e.g., data collection, trends analysis). These activities, in turn, support the local-level approach, which aims to establish, implement, and validate evidence-based models of integrated POHC in communities underserved by oral health care.
MCH-IOHI Projects
Colorado: Cavity Free Care Network
Organizations: Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment in collaboration with Denver Health and the University of Colorado
Target population: Children ages 1–21
Connecticut: Improving Oral Health for Young Children in Connecticut Through Policy, Practice, Education, and Evaluations
Organizations: Moses-Weitzman Health System, MWHS-Weitzman Institute
Target population: Infants and children ages 6 months to 5 years
Montana: Montana Oral Health Equity Alliance
Organization: Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services
Target population: Children ages 1–21
New York: Transforming Oral Health for Communities
Organization: Health Center Network of New York (HealthEfficient)
Target population: Pregnant women and infants and children from birth to age 40 months
Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico Maternal and Child Health—Improving Oral Health Integration Demonstration Project
Organization: University of Puerto Rico, Medical Sciences Campus, School of Dental Medicine
Target population: Pregnant women and infants and children from birth to age 4
South Carolina: South Carolina Integration Demonstration Project
Organization: South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control
Target population: Infants and children from birth to age 11
Texas: Preventive Oral Health Care Integration in Texas Initiative
Organizations: Texas Department of State Health Services, Oral Health Improvement Program in collaboration with the University of Texas Health San Antonio School of Dentistry, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, the Texas Association of Community Health Centers, and the Texas Oral Health Coalition
Target population: Pregnant women
Wisconsin: Wisconsin Maternal and Child Health—Improving Oral Health Integration Demonstration Project
Organization: Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin
Target population: Children ages 1–21 with plans to expand to pregnant women and children and youth with special health care needs
Learning Collaborative
MCH-IOHI projects will participate in an MCH-IOHI learning collaborative (LC) supported by the Consortium for Oral Health. The consortium is led by the National Maternal and Child Oral Health Resource Center working with the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors. The MCH-IOHI LC is also supported by FrameShift Group.
The LC will foster consensus and a joint approach among projects and will provide peer-to-peer learning opportunities for members to share information about successes, lessons learned, and challenges related to their two-tier state-level and local-level improvement approach that addresses the three core functions. Members will share project resources and strategies for project implementation. The cross-pollination of ideas and resources shared among LC participants will enhance project activities and enable projects to achieve more collectively than they could as individual projects.
Program Objectives
- By June 2028, 85 percent of the MCH-IOHI project teams will report enhanced policy and/or scope of practice aimed to increase access and use of integrated preventive oral health care.
- By June 2028, MCH-IOHI project teams will report increased oral health awareness among 85 percent of the health organizations across the state targeted for organizational oral health literacy training and outreach.
- By June 2028, 85 percent of the MCH-IOHI project teams will implement state-level oral health surveillance enhancements aimed to improve trend analysis.
- By June 2028, 100 percent of participating primary care settings will implement an evidence-based model of care aimed to integrate preventive oral health care and primary care services, to include primary-care-clinic workflow modifications, provider training, and dental-referral tracking.
Contact
If you have questions or need additional information about the MCH-IOHI projects, please contact Susan Lorenzo, MCH-IOHI program manager/librarian.