NNOHA partnered with Delta Dental of Colorado Foundation, Washington Dental Service Foundation, and AFL Enterprises, LLC to create a Dental Dashboard and User’s Guide. These tools are for individual Community Health Centers to use as a part of their quality improvement efforts, to more effectively monitor and measure quality, and drive performance within their dental programs. 

Dashboards give a quick status  update for key measures and allow Health Center leadership to monitor  factors that affect quality and drive performance. Regularly seeing the  data for an organization makes it much easier to respond quickly to  areas of concern, or to change courses of action.

Dental Dashboard Measures

The Dental Dashboard consists of 15 measures that are organized into three categories:

CHC Population Health

1. Caries at Recall

2. Risk Assessment of all Dental Patients

3. Oral Evaluation and/or Risk Assessment of all Primary Care Patients

4. Sealants (6-9 year olds)

5. Sealants (10-14 year olds)

6. Topical Fluoride

7. Self-Management Goal Setting

8. Self-Management Goal Review

9. Treatment Plan Completion

Fiscal and Operational Sustainability

10. Recall Rates

11. No Shows

12. Charges (Production) Per Encounter

13. Encounters Per Hour

14. Direct Cost Per Visit

Patient Satisfaction

15. Recommendation to Family and Friends

The User’s Guide is a companion to support the implementation and use of the Dental Dashboard. The in-depth document gives users more details about:

• How the recommended measures were selected

• Specifies the numerators and denominators

• What codes are needed to track the measures

• Tips for how to collect the data

• Instructions for how to access the online template

These measure specifications are provided by the Dental Quality Alliance (DQA) as technical support to support NNOHA’s Sealants Learning Collaborative (2017-2020). Some of the measures in this document do not necessarily align with national standards. These specifications are meant for use for monthly reporting within quality improvement (QI) applications within practices. Reliability assessments of the measure scores have not been conducted, and the measure specifications are not intended for use in accountability applications. For an in-depth discussion on difference between accountability and quality improvement measures, visit the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse.