G-2308-19465

Based in Minnesota, Ready, Set, Smile (RSS) provides education and preventive services to prepare and empower children to care for their oral health. RSS believe that breaking the chain of health disparity requires collaboration between institutions, nonprofits, and the private sector. In this spirit, RSS has joined forces with Apple Tree Dental to pilot a first-of-its-kind Dental Home Network for low-income children who lack equitable access to dental care. This pilot builds on the combined strengths of these two nonprofit organizations with deep experience serving low-income families and communities of color: RSS, which provides oral health education and preventive and minimally-invasive caries-controlling services on site in early learning centers and elementary schools (pre-K to 8th grade), and Apple Tree Dental, which provides comprehensive office-based dental services ranging from routine care to more complex services for children with extensive or special dental care needs.

This pilot will advance integrated and person-centered models by addressing social determinants of health, creating career pathways, expanding interoperability of software systems, expanding models of reimbursement, and exploring new models to expand access. Together, RSS and Apple Tree will develop the specific systems, policies, and procedures that connect the children at the 40+ RSS partner school sites with a “dental home” practitioner who can provide ongoing care and address more complex dental concerns, if needed.

To address the workforce shortage in in the RSS service aera, RSS created a Community Health Worker (CHW) model to offer a career pathway into the field of dentistry for adults from communities underrepresented in the profession. RSS will recruit, hire, train, and deploy CHWs from underrepresented communities to serve as clinical assistants for their school-based clinics, as oral health educators in classrooms, and as champions of oral health in our school communities. CHW clinical services are reimbursable through medical insurance, however, RSS struggles to get insurance companies to adequately reimburse for those services. As an upstream approach to disease prevention, RSS will advocate with medical insurance providers to get them to reimburse CHWs consistently and fairly for their clinical services and classroom education.

The budget for this proposal is $125,000, which represents 15% of the total organizational budget. Included in the budget are funds for personnel including portions of the executive director, program director, oral health specialist, and community health worker.