NNOHA supports your programs in your journey to deliver quality care that leads to positive patient outcomes.

NNOHA strongly encourages health centers to adopt patient-centered approaches to care and partnering with patients to plan the most efficient way to complete treatment timely. The current standard of care is to provide quadrant dentistry when possible and NNOHA recommends that all health centers adopt that practice for their oral health program. Health centers should not engage in churning because it puts the organization at risk of legal and financial exposure. NNOHA advises health centers to be cautious of potential fraud and abuse violations under federal and state laws.

As part of its mission to improve the oral health of underserved populations, NNOHA advocates for continuous quality improvement and strategies to improve access to care, because a quality improvement approach inherently centers on the needs and outcomes of the patients served by the health care system.

This resource, developed by AFL Enterprises, includes virtual training resources that can be used to share quality improvement techniques and practices more widely within your health center.

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.

The Measurement workgroup of the NNOHA Quality Committee developed this resource to help with some of the challenges of using diagnostic codes. The workgroup has tried to simplify the diagnostic codes to a more manageable list that includes all aspects of dentistry. This resource can be used as a diagnostic code cheat sheet to be given to a new dentist or student at a health center. It can also be given as a guide to a health center's IT team.

This e-learning program provides oral health professionals with basic knowledge and skills related to cultural and linguistic competency, based on the HHS Office of Minority Health’s National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (the National CLAS Standards).

The DQA is an organization of major stakeholders in oral health care delivery that will use a collaborative approach to develop oral health care measures.

This promising practice describes how Choptank Community Health System established dental treatment guidelines for adult patients with uncontrolled hypertension who were attending acute care.

The Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) is responsible for effective and efficient oversight of the Health Center Program. This includes ensuring that health centers comply with applicable statutory and regulatory requirements for the Health Center Program. The Health Center Program Compliance Manual serves as a streamlined and consolidated resource to assist health centers in understanding and demonstrating compliance with Health Center Program and Federal Torts Claims Act program requirements.

This promising practice describes how El Rio Community Health Center instituted an integrated, preventive approach to caries prevention utilizing the pediatric medical and dental professional staff, while simultaneously increasing access to care.

This chapter explores Quality Improvement for health center dental programs. 

This publication, developed by the National Maternal and Child Oral Health Resource Center (2012), presents a consensus statement that resulted from an expert workgroup meeting convened by the Health Resources and Services Administration in collaboration with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Dental Association held on October 18, 2011, in Washington, DC. The consensus statement provides guidance on oral health care for pregnant women for both prenatal care health professionals and oral health professionals, pharmacological considerations for pregnant women, and guidance for health professionals to share with pregnant women.

This 2012 white paper, prepared to support the work of the Funders Oral Health Policy Group by Qualis Health, presents case studies of four Community Health Centers that have taken steps to have medical and dental delivery systems work more closely together and to incorporate oral health in their quality improvement processes. Drawing on insights from these case studies as well as national literature on this subject, this paper identifies key lessons learned.

In this promising practice, the dental department at Clinica Family Health Services in Denver, CO, describes how they used a quality improvement tool to implement a new scheduling template, with the goal of increasing treatment plan completion rates.

Developed by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Group on Oral Health, the Smiles for Life curriculum is designed to enhance the role of primary care clinicians in the promotion of oral health for all age groups through the development and dissemination of high-quality educational resources.