Category 7
Health Care, Access to Care, Insurance, Technology

Background: Oral health is essential to overall health for pregnant women. However, only one in four Medicaid-enrolled pregnant women (28%) statewide had a dental visit in 2018. Knowledge gaps regarding prenatal oral health care have been reported among dental and medical providers even though state guidelines are published.

Goal: In partnership with the University of Maryland Women's Health Center (UMWHC) the University of Maryland School of Dentistry (UMSOD), initiated a prenatal oral health program to integrate oral health care into prenatal care and enhance dental hygiene students' case management role to ensure that oral health referrals result in dental visits for pregnant patients.

Objectives: The program has two goals: 1) to increase the number of prenatal patients receiving oral health risk assessment, education and referral to a dental home at the UMWHC and 2) to increase the dental utilization rate of Medicaid -enrolled pregnant women at the UMSOD.

Approach/Methods: The program was initiated by dental hygiene students providing oral health screenings and education in treatment rooms at UMWHC, while pregnant patients awaited their prenatal provider. As a result of overhearing messages about the importance of prenatal oral health care, nurses and nurse-midwives were trained to include oral health risk assessment, screenings, preventive interventions, education and referrals into their prenatal care protocol. Concurrently, UMSOD established case management protocols to support pregnant patients with scheduling dental appointments at the UMSOD.

Results: To evaluate the effectiveness of this ongoing inter-professional collaborative, the dental hygiene program is tracking: 1) the number of patients referred to the UMSOD from the UMWHC, 2) the number of patients who report for dental appointments at the UMSOD, 3) the number of patients who fail/cancel appointments, 4) the number of patients who receive urgent care services and 5) the number of patients who complete dental hygiene services.

Importance to Public Health: This innovative program integrates oral health providers into primary care to disseminate evidence-based oral health information to health care providers outside of dentistry while expanding access to care for an underserved population.