Brightening Oral Health: Teaching and Implementing Oral Health Risk Assessments in Pediatric Care
To expedite pediatric clinician’s adoption of oral health care recommendations during well child visits, the AAP partnered with Procter & Gamble: Live, Learn and Thrive to work with pediatric offices to develop and test a practice tool to assist them in conducting an Oral Health Risk Assessment. read more>
This was a multi-phase project starting with pediatric dentists and pediatricians collaborating to review the existing caries assessment tools utilized by the pediatric dentistry community. They then created a modified version for pediatric primary care. Given that the tool was built on the expert consensus, it was essential to test and refine the tool with a group of practicing pediatric clinicians. To do this, the Brightening Oral Health team partnered with the AAP Quality Improvement Innovation Network (QuIIN). The QuIIN is a network of practicing pediatricians and their staff teams who use quality improvement methods to test tools to improve health care and outcomes for children and their families. Through the QuIIN, AAP tested the Oral Health Risk Assessment tool with 12 pediatric practices. Upon determining the tool was feasibly implemented within the pediatric office, the AAP recruited 10 practice teams that saw a majority of underserved patients for testing the tool across a 6-month period. This phase was constructed to get a better understanding of how pediatric teams fully integrate the tool into day-to-day practice over a longer period of time. In addition, the sites submitted pre- and post-data and attended monthly education and sharing teleconferences. Further, the sites held local community meetings to build community level stakeholder buy-in for implementation. The result of this project is this pediatrician-friendly tool that queues the identification of caries risk factors and helps pediatricians to identify risk and know when to refer urgently, apply fluoride varnish, and provide behavioral/nutritional counseling.