Thank you for attending the 2019 NNOHA Conference in Las Vegas, NV. We hope you learned some new information and enjoyed the time networking with colleagues. An email with a link to your Continuing Education certificate was sent out via email. Contact info@nnoha.org with any questions.

Back by popular demand, NNOHA is once again offering this fundamentals course on the basics of running an effective oral health program. Topics include: Financials, Health Center Fundamentals, Leadership, Quality, Risk Management and Workforce & Staffing.

This session takes a deep dive in the financials of a health center dental program. Speakers go beyond the basic fundamentals of financials, review sliding fee scales, and discuss grant writing for outside grant opportunities.

Is your health center dental program ready for an Operational Site Visit? Is your dental program in compliance with each of the 19 program guidelines? Do you know what the “hot button” items are for Site Surveyors? Would you be ready for an FTCA audit? Learn all of this and more.

What is the value society places on oral health? What is the return on investment for both the public and private sector for interventions that improve oral health? What does it really mean to say you can not be healthy without good oral health? This session discusses how our current dental care system might need to change and adapt in order to drive sustained improvements in oral health. It also highlights some of the economic arguments for investing in oral health and new opportunities emerging to integrate oral health with mainstream health and wellness interventions.

Work/life balance has been explained as a misguided metaphor for grasping the relationship between work and the rest of life. The image forces one to think in terms of trade-offs instead of the possibilities for harmony. It’s no secret—managing all the things you must do as an adult is a challenge. A unified perspective of work and life is needed. Instead of balance, we need to integrate work and the rest of life.

Delta Dental of Colorado Foundation and the Arcora Foundation worked with NNOHA, Health Center experts and test groups to develop the Health Center Dental Dashboard, which is a set of measures that is a tool for Health Centers to use as part of their quality improvement program. This session will feature an overview of these dental measures, as well as recommendations for application at your Health Center.

This session will present CareOregon Dental, a Medicaid plan, which collaborates with co-located FQHC provider partners on strategies for oral health integration, improved dental utilization, shared goals and achievement of the Quadruple Aim.  CareOregon’s Oral Health Integration Projects (OHIP) strategy builds and supports the development of clinical infrastructure for improved integrated care-delivery with an overarching goal to increase dental utilization and bidirectional integration. OHIP is designed to break down silos and strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, leading to ultimate healthcare transformation.

The session will present the MORE Care framework developed to promote interprofessional practice. Practical applications how a Dental Managed Care Organization utilized the framework to engage local communities to collaborate for oral health integration using real-time data to understand opportunities for improvement.

HIV is no longer a death sentence and widely considered a chronic, manageable disease. Rapid HIV diagnosis and treatment are needed to ensure declines in HIV incidence. With advances in prevention (i.e., pre-exposure prophylaxis) and biomedical science (i.e., undetectable = untransmittable), we now have the tools to end the epidemic. State and federal government agencies are using these tools and data to establish ending the epidemic strategic plans with the goal of addressing the public health crisis of HIV.

Surveillance data, however, suggests that 15% of people living with HIV in the United States are unaware of their HIV infection and remain at risk of transmitting HIV infection. Dentists and dental hygienists were among the first to recognize oral manifestations in people living with HIV in the early days of the epidemic and may still have a role in helping to identify new cases by administering rapid HIV testing in the dental setting. Administering chair-side screenings in the dental setting may help improve health outcomes, address health inequalities, and improve the quality of life of persons at risk for and living with HIV.

No matter your walk of life, it’s an exciting time — but it can often be a very testing one as well. What is the link between burnout and happiness? Burnout can be caused by being over-strained, being exhausted. Happiness is the buffer against burnout.

We’ve all heard the old adage: if you’ve seen one health center, you’ve seen one health center. The first step in creating a successful dental program is determining what we mean by success and how we will measure that success. This session will discuss the important measures of success (finance, access and outcomes), common benchmarks and provide guidance in how each health center administrative and leadership team can establish and track their own unique, meaningful and achievable dental goals.

Patients today are living well into advanced age, and with multiple chronic illnesses. Just as there are aspects of oral health that impact systemic health, the same is also true. However, sometimes it can become overwhelming to recall all of the biomedical science knowledge you learned once upon a time. In this presentation, we will review how to stratify patients based on a medical risk assessment. We will then delve more deeply into medical conditions that may impact bleeding, wound healing, and risk of infection.

Life is about being able to set a vision and persist over the long haul as you lead yourself and others to break barriers and move toward the finish line. Health and wellness are key components of being an effective leader. Wellness is defined as “the quality or state of being healthy in body and mind, especially as the result of deliberate effort.”

Patient-centered, high-continuity care is core to Clinica Family Health, and we achieve this by focusing on empanelment and Advanced Access principles in partnership between clinical and operations. With so many scheduling rules, carve-outs and exceptions, dental scheduling is too complicated and cumbersome, which makes it difficult for staff to do their jobs and patients to receive care when they want and need it.  Utilizing Advanced Access scheduling principles that include empanelment and schedule simplification, participants will learn best practices for working in partnership to develop and implement efficient processes for patient access, patient continuity, and patient and staff satisfaction.

This course describes the features of one of the largest school-based teledentistry programs since 2016 and how it can reduce school absenteeism and bring care to children that would never get to the dentist otherwise. Download Slides

What challenging conversation is on your schedule today? Successful communication with adolescents on sensitive issues can positively impact their oral health – and overall well-being – but they aren’t easy! Dental professionals find it challenging to talk with adolescent patients and parents/caregivers about a host of medical conditions and lifestyle choices related to oral health, including obesity, eating disorders, substance use, transgender choices, sexual practices, pregnancy and STIs. Based on the results of a 2019 survey of pediatric dentists, this session discusses difficult topics that arise in conversations with adolescents and assesses the biggest barriers to communicating about sensitive issues. It offers practical advice on how to hold effective conversations on potentially embarrassing topics, engage adolescents in more open conversations and provide much needed information on vital health concerns. A must-attend session for every member of the clinical team who wants to go beyond shrugs and eye rolls while serving the adolescent patient population. Download Slides

This course will provide a review of endodontic diagnosis, principles of canal access and location. We will consider how the latest in clinical research can guide our use of new technology to achieve optimal endodontic results. The use of Adaptive Motion Technology to prepare the root canal system to permit safe effective chemical cleansing of the canal system and predictable obturation.

Scheduling is a critically important tool dental programs have to ensure their success. However, patient appointments are often scheduled without a great deal of thought or planning. The result is often days where we fail to meet our key strategic goals of access, outcomes and finance. There are many reasons why scheduling doesn’t help us achieve the success we want and need for our dental programs. This session will provide specific guidance on how to use the dental schedule thoughtfully to support dental program success.

Come join us for an interactive session on patient centered treatment planning for complex pediatric and elderly patients. In this course we will discuss how to gather the appropriate patient information and assess the patient’s risk of oral disease to make your treatment planning decision process easier. For pediatric patients we will focus on understanding when and how to use medical caries management and what the current treatment recommendations are for children with early childhood caries. In elderly patients we will learn what patient centered rational treatment planning looks like and how and when to use it. We will also discuss working with patients with special health care needs at all stages of life as part of your general practice.

This course will provide an overview of the opioid crisis focusing on the oral manifestations of substance use disorder, the integration of oral health services in Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) program and dental treatment considerations for patients enrolled in MAT programs.

This session provides a comprehensive profile of a successful “dentally driven” ED Referral program developed within a dental residency program which includes effective strategies to address opioid abuse issues and access to care dilemmas. Resolving ED dental utilization addresses substance abuse issues, while connecting pregnant women, diabetics, and autistic patients to dental homes. It also has meaningful impact in the medical community, educating them on pathways to collaborate professionally within a well designed interdisciplinary system.

Through a series of videos of actual patient treatment, participants will be able to learn techniques to provide care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The providers shown will include novice clinicians, experienced clinicians, dental students and dental auxiliaries. This presentation will allow participants to feel as if they are right in the treatment area observing patient care.

This year’s presentation will highlight the most successful strategies to increase the percentage of children receiving sealants and increase the HRSA UDS Sealants Measure percentage. Results and trends from the first four years of data for the measure will be shared. Work-arounds to address data collection and reporting will be briefly described for those health centers that are not yet using an EDR vendor-developed solution to collect the data elements of the measure (age, patient of record, risk status, exclusions, and sealants placed). Commwell Health, an FQHC, will also discuss how they have improved their UDS Sealants Measure through their work in the NNOHA Sealants Improvement Collaborative.

Dental programs are complex and challenging to manage successfully. There are so many variables that need to be controlled; how does a leader keep all those balls in the air? The truth is that not all dental variables play an equal role in the success of a dental program. This session will focus on the top 10 variables that are integral for dental program success, why they are important and how they can and should be managed.

One strategy of expanding access to dental services for health center patients is through contracting for dental services. This session will review how health centers programs can contract for dental services. Dr. Tim Martinez will discuss how Borrego Health contracts for dental services outside of their health center. Dr. Nick Rogers will offer his unique perspective as a dental provider who contracts with health centers.

This seminar will prepare the participant to handle the interface with the cancer care team. Oral side effects are the number one reason why patients cannot complete their treatment protocol. This session will give you the knowledge and confidence to treat this most neglected subset of patients.

This session will describe how one health center in WA state partnered with a long-term care facility to bring access to dental care in a meaningful, effective, and efficient manner. Learn what challenges they overcame, both clinical and operational, to develop a sustainable program that led to improved oral health outcomes for a special population.

Integration of oral health and primary care practice has been a strategy to increase access to oral health care for health center patients. An emerging trend for medical and dental integration is the use of dental providers in the medical setting. This session will review the results from the 2019 Integrated Models survey, assessing for health centers’ use of an embedded dental provider in the medical clinic. It will also review strategies to integrate oral health and primary care practice. Finally, this session will feature a panel of three health centers who will provide promising practices on how they have successfully integrated a dental provider into the medical clinic for early detection of oral disease and to increase access to preventive interventions.

During the NNOHA Membership Meeting at the 2019 NNOHA Conference there were discussions on common issues that those within community health centers deal with such as too many patients, no shows and turnover. Please see the summary of those discussions below.