G-2103-16825

NACHC is the national member association for community health centers, founded in 1971, which promotes efficient, high quality, comprehensive health care that is accessible, culturally and linguistically competent, community directed, and patient-centered for all.

Historically, our work with NACHC has focused on working to integrate oral health throughout the inner workings of their organization’s approach towards advancing person-centered and integrated care in health centers. Additionally, they have provided direct technical support to the Primary Care Association Oral Health Collaborative (POHC) over time, built oral health components into their national conferences, and more recently collaborated on signature papers and resources with the CareQuest Institute.

This proposal falls under the Advancing Equity funding initiative, and the Spread Learning Models to the Broader Safety Net sub-initiative and seeks to continue to support health centers as key sources for new models of care, payment, and population health management. More specifically, NACHC will seek to design a series of case studies that look at new models of interprofessional collaboration between primary care, behavioral health, and tele-dentistry and work to promote them through national conferences. A second target of the work will be to design a new care team member, the Oral Health Assistant, in collaboration with A.T. Still University, with the intent to create entry pathways for community members to serve on the dental team. A last focal point will be to increase the use of population health management tools amongst health center oral health programs, deepening their capacity to operationalize a frame of social risk factors.

The budget for this proposal is $250,000, which includes about $160,000 for salaried and contracted staff time. The remaining funding is for staff supplies and travel associated with completion of the project as well as overhead costs.

The Internal Review Committee discussed the importance of the ongoing partnership with NACHC, and, in response to this specific proposal, is pursuing additional due diligence around a couple pieces of information, including

While there is roughly $160,000 in staff time, only $39,305 of that is for actual NACHC staff, with the remaining going to contractors. The review committee recommends clarifying the organizational commitment and the potential to have the scope of this work woven into the work of formal NACHC staff.

While the broad context of the proposal felt aligned with the CareQuest Institute’s strategy, there were several areas that lacked specificity. The review committee recommends clarifying and aligning key buckets of work related to education, expanded utilization of population health tools, and expanding the oral health workforce.