Provider updates

Congratulations, Oral Health Integration Projects (OHIP) partners, for completing our year-long OHIP Learning Collaborative and transforming whole person healthcare in our community!

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In 2017, we worked with our co-located community health center partners to develop five unique, large scale, two-year, transformative proposals, and in early 2018, pledged nearly $2 million in financial backing along with significant technical assistance and support. The Oral Health Integration Projects (OHIP) strategy was launched to build infrastructure and improve integrated care delivery.

Collectively, the projects focus on strategies that improve clinical integration and patient engagement.

OHIP areas of focus:

• Clackamas County Health Centers: Trauma-informed care in the dental office
• Multnomah County Health Department: Immunizations in the dental setting
• Native American Rehabilitation Association of the Northwest: Culturally appropriate community outreach and on-site dental services at adult residential treatment and diabetes clinic sites
• Neighborhood Health Centers: Occupational therapy to increase oral health-promoting behavior
• Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center: Hygienists embedded in prenatal and diabetes primary care teams and enhancements to the combined electronic health record

In 2019, we launched the OHIP Learning Collaborative, a year-long networking of integrated OHIP project teams and CareOregon cross-disciplinary faculty. Unlike traditional learning collaboratives, in which participants share the same initiative, OHIP partners are engaged with five different and unique projects with the shared goal of cross-implementation. Utilizing core principles of The Breakthrough Series: Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement, the Learning Collaborative spread OHIP initiatives and supported the sharing of tools, data, lessons learned, barriers and solutions.

The Learning Collaborative included three in-person Learning Sessions and six Virtual Meeting webinars with topics identified from on-going work. The CareOregon OHIP faculty team modeled interdisciplinary clinical and operational leadership, provided direct support to each project and presented on relevant topics during OHIP learning sessions. Our unique partnership with project teams allowed us to be viewed as collaborators, in addition to the health plan.

Outcomes from the OHIP Learning Collaborative are improved patient experiences, sharing of best practices, and a self-propelling spirit of collaboration. The focus is on commonalities that can be transferred across the region. Thank you to our OHIP partners for the hard work and effort they put into both their projects and the Learning Collaborative. These projects have now become standard work and continue to help improve the health of our patients and communities.