Quality Improvement and Oral Health

This report provides information about the quality of oral health care for infants and children from birth through age 6 enrolled in Medicaid in New Jersey. The report includes information on the importance of oral health. Data on the oral health status of infants and children living in the state, including those enrolled in Head Start, and about receipt of oral health care among these infants and children is presented. The report also describes a "secret shopper" survey used to assess quality and provides the quality measures used, methods, and results.

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This brief provides a national summary of selected oral health care quality measures for children developed by the Dental Quality Alliance (DQA) and displayed in DQA's State Oral Healthcare Quality Dashboard. The brief offers information on the following selected measures: Oral Evaluation, Dental Services (by or under the supervision of a dentist); Topical Fluoride for Children; and Sealant Receipt on Permanent First Molars. Data is presented on these three measures for the period 2016–2020.

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This report describes the framework that the 2023 Medicaid and CHIP Oral Health Initiative (OHI) Workgroup used to set priorities for improving oral health care access, quality, and outcomes and advancing health equity in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The report also summarizes workgroup input for the following focus areas: strategic priorities, strategies, and measures for monitoring progress for the next phase of the OHI. It provides background on why good oral health is important and about what the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has done to achieve the goal of improving oral health care for Americans, as well as about the workgroup’s charge.

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This handout outlines a set of maternal and child health quality indicators to monitor oral health services delivered in public health programs and systems of care. Indicators for women of childbearing age and pregnant women are broken into three categories: access, utilization, and outcomes. Indicators for children are broken into four categories: access, utilization, process, and outcomes.[Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This guide provides information about pediatric measures designed for use by public programs (e.g., Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance Program), state marketplaces, dental benefits administrators, and managed care organizations and developed by the Dental Quality Alliance. The guide provides background and discusses measure-implementation considerations; data collection, preparation, and reporting measures implemented using administrative enrollment and claims/encounter data; and measure-score interpretation relative to overall utilization. Frequently asked questions are also addressed.

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This guide provides guidance on implementing oral health quality indicators for the maternal and child health population. The guide provides background information on the indicators and presents indicator summaries. Also included are general guidelines for data collection, preparation, and reporting and technical specifications. [Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This guide provides information for developing messages and educational resources education about quality measures, performance, and evaluation. Topic include an introduction to quality measures; a rationale for measuring; and information on national interest in quality measures, players in the oral-health-care-quality landscape, and challenges related to measurement in oral health care. Information on the Dental Quality Alliance and its measure-development process is also included, along with information on level of measurement and measurement alignment.

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This paper provides information about two oral health quality measures for pregnant women that the Dental Quality Alliance has developed. The paper explains why oral health care during pregnancy and the development of related oral-healthcare-quality measures are important, as well as how health-care-quality measures are reported. It also discusses identifying pregnant women in claims data for denominator inclusion, determining enrollment requirements for denominator inclusion, determining time frame for receipt of recommended services for numerator inclusion, and the impact of benefits coverage on identification services for numerator inclusion. [Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This brief includes information on the value-based care (VBC) model. Under this model, health professionals are paid based on the overall quality of care they provide, not on the number of services rendered or the number of patients served. The brief describes three models (fee for service, capitation or managed care, and VBC) and presents recommendations for VBC programs that provide children with oral health care. Challenges to developing a VBC system are addressed.

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This is a consolidated guideline of new and existing recommendations on routine postnatal care for women and newborns receiving facility- or community-based postnatal care in any resource setting. It provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for care during the postnatal period, focusing on the essential package that all women and newborns should receive. This guideline updates and expands upon the 2014 WHO recommendations on postnatal care of the mother and newborn, and complements existing WHO guidelines on the management of postnatal complications. The recommendations are intended to inform the development of relevant national and subnational health policies, clinical protocols and programmatic guides.

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This report provides an overview of the oral health quality indicators for the maternal and child health (MCH) population created by the Centers for Oral Health Systems Integration and Improvement, Quality Advisory Team (QIAT). The overview explains what the indicators are and their purpose. It also describes the framework QIAT created to support quality measurement and improvement, an environmental scan of existing quality indicators, pilot implementation, and challenges and opportunities. [Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This readiness assessment is designed for state oral health programs to explore capacity for collection of, access to, and analysis of the data used to calculate maternal and child health oral health quality indicators. It is organized by the data sources used to calculate the indicators: the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the Basic Screening Survey, and Medicaid administrative claims and enrollment data. [Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This report provides results from the Center for Oral Health Systems Integration and Improvement’s Quality Indicators Advisory Team’s efforts to establish a set of maternal and child oral health quality indicators to monitor oral health services delivered in public health programs and systems of care. The report provides indicators for women of child-bearing age and pregnant women and for children, as well as a user guide, and discusses implementation strategies, indicator limitations, and challenges in obtaining data. [Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau]

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This report provides ideas for how states can use a driver diagram on oral health produced by Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to advance prevention of oral disease in primary care, plan a quality-improvement (QI) project, and determine how to improve outcomes. The report offers background, presents the driver diagram, explains the driver diagram, and provides ideas for activities to promote change.

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