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As CareOregon Dental’s Dental Director, Dr. Sherry Edwards reviews the plan’s utilization management, provides appeal adjudication, and performs payment integrity and clinical chart audits. She graduated from Loma Linda University School of Dentistry in 2002 and has been contributing to the oral health community throughout the 17 years since then.

The nuts and bolts of her position involve dental referrals, authorizations, appeals review and final adjudications. But the path of clinical expertise and passion for public health is what empowers her to be so excellent in her professional delivery.

Her passion for public health ignited in childhood; both her parents worked in public health higher education. Her parents’ careers took her abroad; Sherry lived in the Philippines from infancy until her ninth year. She first visited Oregon on vacation when she was fifteen years old. She fell in love with the autumn colors, rain and fog as she drove through the Gorge. The climate was refreshingly contradictory to her childhood spent between the Southern California desert valley and tropical islands in which she grew up. She knew Oregon would one day be her home.

Sherry embarked upon her career at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Eastern Washington that embraced and practiced hands-on oral/physical health integration. She remembers a pediatrician knocking down her door with a four-day-old baby, born with a tooth that needed to be removed so she could feed from her mother’s breast. Another time it was a young boy and his mother. He had survived a deadly car accident and had facial scarring, trauma, and lost three front teeth which had healed with no vestibule. After working with an oral surgeon and then putting in his partial, he beamed, and his mother cried.

Dr. Edwards now contributes to public health largely from a different angle, but she is happy to still work directly with patients on occasion as an on-call dentist.

In her free time, she travels and continues to explore Oregon.