GRANT00347

Support to the University of Texas Foundation to further enhance the SmilesMaker technology to incorporate electronic feedback mechanisms that efficiently integrate oral health outcomes of children collected through school-based oral health programs to school nurses and electronic records in educational settings as well as establishing the groundwork to link to additional pathways in collaboration with health and social service professionals to increase coordinated care of children. SmilesMaker is an innovative and versatile oral health measurement system used in the Miles of Smiles-Laredo school-based prevention program, which can be adapted for community-based oral health programs to reliably collect longitudinal data in standardized formats. The SmilesMaker© system utilizing the Basic Screening Survey will be expanded to various platforms including an IOS application, a web-based entry system, a dashboard monitoring tool, and fingerprint tracking technology. This project has oral health policy implications by measuring eruption patterns to consider earlier preventive intervention in school-based programs. Data collected through SmilesMaker impacts the development of standardized metrics recommended at the local and state levels as it provides opportunities to unify outcome measures in an publically available online resource center. The case management component of the SmilesMaker system assures identification of oral health needs, assessing and addresses barriers to assessing care, so that successful linkages are made to the oral health system. Miles of Smiles--Laredo provides preventive services based on contemporary evidence and public health principles. The dashboard component of the SmilesMaker system will allow for real-time monitoring of oral health outcomes and programmatic changes for targeted quality of care improvements and accountability.