Judy Cunningham, CDA and Quality Specialist Angie Bennett show off the award they received May 1.
Valley View Health Center in Chehalis recently accepted an award for its work on a program that tracks patients’ dental history and uses it to assess if they are at-risk for cavities.
“Dental doesn’t get a lot of recognition in the medical field,” said Quality Specialist Angie Bennett, who worked on the project. “It’s nice that it’s really becoming an integral part of whole health and the medical field is recognizing the need for quality oral health, too.”
Dental Director Dr. Lou Ann Mercier, DDS; IT Director Michael Schieffer; Dr. Elissa Maynard, DDS; Judy Cunningham, CDA and Bennett all worked on the project.
Qualis Health recognized their accomplishments at the 2018 Northwest Patient Safety Conference on May 1. Valley View Health Center in Chehalis won the Award of Excellence for a Federally Qualified Health Center for “Establishing a Quality-Focused Dashboard for the Dental Department at Valley View Health Center to Drive Quality Improvement Efforts.”
Mercier led the project, Maynard talked to her provider colleagues to get them on board and Schieffer created the reports and graphs along with Mercier. Bennett was originally the clinical support, but later took over as quality specialist. That’s when Cunningham was brought in as clinical support.
“It’s hard to come in in a project that’s already started, but you can still feel the energy of the group,” Cunningham said.
The program assesses patients’ risk for cavities.
“The project is using some ADA, or American Dental Association, guidelines to assess children ages 0-20 for their, it’s called ‘caries risk,’ which is their risk of having cavities,” Bennet said. It’s based off of a number of different things — family dynamic, siblings’ history, parents’ history, diet.”
The dashboard also tracks the fillings patients have already had and their history of cavities.
“Then they’re ranked as low, medium or high risk,” Bennett said. “The majority of our patients are high risk. Then the second piece of that, is when they turn age 6-9, is are they receiving a sealant on one or all of their first molars? So we built into our dental program how to track if they have had sealants, have had fillings, if they need a sealant. Then we developed a dental dashboard, which is how we keep track of the quality metrics for dental. Not many places have a dental dashboard, so that was the big push for us to get that award.”
The “dental dashboard” measures the number of patients the clinic has seen, their risk level, if they qualify for the sealant metric and if they have already had one placed as well.
“The first part of this project was this national collaborative that we participated in,” Bennett said. “We were one of five health centers among the nation to be part of this dental sealant caries risk assessment collaborative, and that was in Denver.”
Over the span of a year, the group made three trips to Denver to work with the other health centers.
Bennett said she is glad to see oral health accomplishments earn more recognition.
“If you think about it, your mouth is pretty much the gateway to your life,” Bennett said. “You nourish through it, you breathe through it, you express. It’s your communication, it’s your nourishment, it’s your survival. So the old saying ‘you are what you eat’ really holds true in oral health and your mouth can have a lot of infection and it can affect many parts of your body. It’s important to keep it healthy because it is your first line of defense.”
