Bright Futures: Health Care Professionals Tools and Resources

Bright Futures Guidelines recommends an oral health risk assessment be performed at the 6 and 9 month well child visits and until a dental home can be established for each child. To help you to incorporate this recommendation into your practice, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has developed the Oral Health Risk Assessment Tool.

The Oral Health Risk Assessment Tool was pilot-tested in 20 pediatrician offices by multidisciplinary teams of pediatric health professionals in partnership with the Brightening Oral Health Expert Group and the AAP Quality Improvement Innovation Network (QuIIN). The results — a tool that over 80% of the practices found easy to implement and the clinician did not need to significantly alter current practice to incorporate risk assessment using this tool. The practice teams also reported that the tool enabled them to implement the Bright Futures oral health recommendations in just 2 minutes during the well child visit.

Available on the AAP Children’s Oral Health Web site, you will find a Web-based tutorial and the free Oral Health Risk Assessment Tool and tool guidance. The Web-based tutorial will familiarize you with the tools content and can be reviewed if you have questions. Download the free Oral Health Risk Assessment Tool and the tool guidance for use in your practice. You are encouraged to duplicate the tool for use in practice or to incorporate its content in to your electronic health record.

Implementation FAQs
Incorporating oral health into your practice is easy to do, but can lead to questions. Many of these have been addressed on the AAP Children’s Oral Health Web site.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ANSWERS

How Should I Set Up My Practice To Include Oral Health?
How and When Do I Provide an Oral Exam and Risk Assessment?
How Do I Help Children To Find a Dental Home?
How Can I Educate Families?
How Do I Get Paid?

Brightening Oral Health: Teaching and Implementing Oral Health Risk Assessments in Pediatric Care
To expedite pediatric clinician’s adoption of oral health care recommendations during well child visits, the AAP partnered with Procter & Gamble: Live, Learn and Thrive to work with pediatric offices to develop and test a practice tool to assist them in conducting an Oral Health Risk Assessment. read more>

This was a multi-phase project starting with pediatric dentists and pediatricians collaborating to review the existing caries assessment tools utilized by the pediatric dentistry community. They then created a modified version for pediatric primary care. Given that the tool was built on the expert consensus, it was essential to test and refine the tool with a group of practicing pediatric clinicians. To do this, the Brightening Oral Health team partnered with the AAP Quality Improvement Innovation Network (QuIIN). The QuIIN is a network of practicing pediatricians and their staff teams who use quality improvement methods to test tools to improve health care and outcomes for children and their families. Through the QuIIN, AAP tested the Oral Health Risk Assessment tool with 12 pediatric practices. Upon determining the tool was feasibly implemented within the pediatric office, the AAP recruited 10 practice teams that saw a majority of underserved patients for testing the tool across a 6-month period. This phase was constructed to get a better understanding of how pediatric teams fully integrate the tool into day-to-day practice over a longer period of time. In addition, the sites submitted pre- and post-data and attended monthly education and sharing teleconferences. Further, the sites held local community meetings to build community level stakeholder buy-in for implementation. The result of this project is this pediatrician-friendly tool that queues the identification of caries risk factors and helps pediatricians to identify risk and know when to refer urgently, apply fluoride varnish, and provide behavioral/nutritional counseling.