The Children's Dental Health Project (CDHP) is slated to begin two new projects that will strengthen how oral healthcare is delivered to better meet parents' needs.
The CDHP was awarded a cooperative agreement from the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau to support its Perinatal and Infant Oral Health Quality Improvement Initiative, the group announced.
The three-year project, the National Network for Perinatal Oral Health, is designed to support states in improving the oral health of pregnant women and infants. The project is a consortium of the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs, the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors, and the National Academy for State Health Policy, and is being led by CDHP Senior Program Manager Shakira Pollard.
The national network is already working closely with state leaders in Connecticut, New York, and West Virginia.
The second project focuses on reducing children's risk of serious caries. Burton Edelstein, DDS, MPH, CDHP founder and senior fellow in public policy, will be the principal investigator in a three-year project to improve children's oral health and their dental care experience at reduced cost by applying principles of chronic disease management to pediatric dentistry.
Funding was awarded to Columbia University by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which announced that Dr. Edelstein and team will use "family-level, peer-counseled, and technology-assisted behavioral risk reduction strategies [to help] divert young children with early- and advanced-stage early childhood caries (ECC) from high-cost surgical dental facilities to low-cost nonsurgical disease management."
