On May 15, 2014, The Public Health Foundation (PHF) hosted the Oral Health Care Advisory Group Meeting at PHF's office in Washington, DC. PHF convened an interdisciplinary team of experts in quality improvement, oral health, epidemiology, and public health practice, to help identify and map drivers that can lead to increased use of oral health care, and develop the Population Health Driver Diagram to Increase Use of Oral Health Care.

 

With funding from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PHF led the development of a driver diagram to help public health and health care organizations work together to increase the proportion of children, adolescents, and adults who use oral health care, education, prevention and treatment. This initiative was developed to address the aim of the Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicator, “Increase the proportion of children, adolescents, and adults who used the oral health care system in the past year.” A population health driver diagram can be used collaboratively by public health, health care, and other partners to identify the potential primary and secondary drivers that can help to achieve an identified community health objective. PHF is currently seeking sponsors to help test and further refine the Population Health Driver Diagram to Increase Use of Oral Health Care for potential use in communities throughout the United States.

 

PHF has successfully used this approach before, having developed and piloted the Public Health Antibiotic Stewardship Driver Diagram, which outlines primary and secondary drivers of optimal antibiotic use. Among the pilot sites testing the driver diagram, an important accomplishment was greater collaboration between public health and health care, which improved the processes and protocols used by stakeholders to improve the use of antibiotics in the community. PHF looks forward to applying this interdisciplinary framework to improve use of oral health care.