Four Steps to Future-Proof Our Oral Health System

This is an excerpt from the July 8 webinar “Consumer Perspectives on Oral Health Access, Outcomes, and Quality of Care.” Carolyn Brown, DDS, M.Ed, senior advisor, consultant, person-centered care at CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, shared her perspective on future-proofing — designing or changing a system so it will continue to be useful and successful in the future if the situation changes — the oral health system.

As for future-proofing . . . how can we take strategies and make sure we aren’t making the same mistakes in the system that we’ve already built? How can we learn from what we’ve heard from the State of Oral Health Equity in America 2021?

1. We need to build an equitable and inclusive system for all. Part of that is listening to your community voice and really taking the time as you’re either changing things, adding benefits, redesigning systems . . . take the time to pull in all sorts of stakeholders so that you are building a system that is going to work for everyone.
    
2. We need to pay for prevention and outcomes and align with the type of system that we’d like to build and sustain. We can see from Consumer Perspectives in the State of Oral Health Equity that there is overwhelming support for alignment dental payment with various components of value-based care.
    
3. We need to investigate and dismantle structural racism in the oral health and overall health system.
    
4. Lastly, as you can see here: Part of the future-proofing is really expanding and protecting all our dental programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and people living with disabilities. Just yesterday, Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, President and CEO of CareQuest Institute, released a statement about dental care being essential health care. This was in response to a policy and a bill that was put forward around expanding Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits.

Hear more from Carolyn and the other two experts on the panel — Madhuli Thakkar-Samtani, BDS, MPH, biostatistician, analytics and evaluation at CareQuest Institute and Eleanor Fleming, PhD, DDS, MPH, associate professor, Department of Dental Public Health, Meharry Medical College — in the full recording of the webinar.