Six Things We Learned in Our First Year as CareQuest Institute

One year ago today — March 29 — we officially launched CareQuest Institute for Oral Health. Building on the strengths of past organizations, including the DentaQuest Partnership for Oral Health Advancement, we are accelerating oral health care transformation and moving faster, together, toward a health system designed for everyone.

What’s our “why?” What drives us?

Our health care system is not built to work for everyone: people of color, those living in rural communities, people with disabilities, older adults, and other historically marginalized groups have been left behind. The result is that millions of Americans suffer from unnecessary oral diseases every year. Our oral health system is ready for — and urgently needs — change.

Every day, that’s what we try to do — create positive change. We elevate ideas and solutions to create a more accessible, equitable, and integrated health system for everyone through our five Areas of Activation: grantmaking, research, health improvement programs, policy and advocacy, and education. Within those areas, the last 12 months were filled with activity:

• In collaboration with dozens of industry leaders and researchers, we published more than 130 publications and peer-reviewed articles.
• We worked with 101 grantees across 33 states, investing more than $14 million to improve local communities and systems.
• We partnered with several organizations to produce more than 20 educational programs, including 16 webinars that provided skills and knowledge to oral health stakeholders.
• We partnered with The Hill on a program about the future of oral health that drew interest from nearly 1,000 leaders across the health care spectrum.
• We educated more than 10,000 oral health professionals, many of whom are striving to make change in our health improvement programs.

Inside those numbers — inside those surveys, presentations, programs, publications, and investments — there are several lessons about the oral health industry that we learned alongside you in the last 12 months. As we reflect on our first year as CareQuest Institute, these six lessons stand above the rest:

1. Equity and access gaps are still widening.

We launched the first-of-its-kind annual consumer oral health survey in 2021 focused on better understanding oral health inequity in the US. The findings were stark but not unexpected: People of color and lower-income populations consistently experience obstacles to preventive oral health care. Our research team is analyzing the results from this year’s survey, and we will be sharing several new publications in the next few months. Early results show that, despite some progress, barriers remain.

2. Communities of like-minded learners are transforming oral health.

Building on past successes, the COrHT (Community Oral Health Transformation) Community Oral Health Transformation (COrHT) and MORE Care™ (Medical Oral Expanded Care) initiatives are positioned to enable more states, dental practices, and partners to work toward redesigning our oral health system. Better coordination, more integration, and the continued transition to value-based care will be the focus as work accelerates with new partners in states like Ohio and North Carolina in the coming months.

3. Strengthening adult dental benefits will be a journey.

For the first time, Medicare dental coverage was a topic of national discussion last year. While the fight to include dental coverage for ALL Medicare beneficiaries continues, the support for ensuring that seniors and people with disabilities have access to the oral health care they need has never been stronger. The fight, undoubtedly, will continue. We also saw more research that strengthening Medicaid benefits helps states, adding energy and evidence to our continued advocacy efforts in 2022.

4. Our veterans deserve better.

In 2021, CareQuest Institute and the American Institute of Dental Public Health (AIDPH) partnered to begin exploring ways to improve veteran oral health care. A joint white paper, created in collaboration with veterans’ organizations and stakeholders across oral health, shined a light on the gaps in oral health access and care for veterans. The ongoing partnership will continue its focus on studying the current state of veteran oral health and access to care and then developing data-driven recommendations informed by the veteran community.

5. There’s a thirst for knowledge about minimally invasive care.

Our most popular webinar from 2021 — Providing Minimally Invasive Care with Silver Diamine Fluoride — came in August, grabbing the attention of nearly 1,000 industry leaders. Minimally invasive dentistry —preventive and noninvasive treatments to equitably reduce suffering from caries and periodontal disease — has the potential to improve the care experience for patients and providers. Our experts answered 17 additional questions after the program, predictably, ran short on time.

6. Holistic, person-centered care is the future.

Our oral health system developed over time in patchwork form, producing a system that isn’t well-designed to achieve the best outcomes for patients. The existing fee-for-service model leads to misaligned financial incentives. And dental providers are siloed from the rest of health care, despite clear evidence of the connection between oral health and overall health and the benefits of integration. We will continue to build upon the Three Domain Framework as we envision a new oral health system of the future.

For all those lessons and more, all of us at CareQuest Institute would like to thank you. Thank you for working with us, learning with us, and improving with us. Together, and only together, we will improve the oral health of all.

We can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.