Oral Health Integration Manager Capitol Dental Care
Participants should be aware of the following financial/non-financial relationships: . Karen Hall, RDH, EPDH: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
In rural Oregon, as in many other parts of the country, patients are seeking care in hospitals for non-traumatic dental pain. Additionally, access for comprehensive dental care is challenging for those who are uninsured or underinsured. So when hospital staff sees patients for chronic conditions, they are also met with chronic unmet dental needs in their patients’ mouths and have limited ability to provide what the patients need to improve their oral health and thus their overall health.
Since 2019, Capitol Dental Care (CDC) has been serving these at-risk hospital patients at two rural hospitals. Samaritan Lebanon Hospital (SLH) and Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital (SNLH) have partnered with (CDC) to place Expanded Practice Dental Hygienists (EPDHs) in their hospitals to provide care for their hospital patients. Karen Hall, Oral Health Integration Manager and EPDH at SNLH, would like to share the journey of these unique colocation integration settings. She will share workflows, statistics, the challenges and how we have navigated those challenges, “a day in the life” examples, as well as what we dream and hope for moving forward.
