On Dec. 16, 2019, NACDD held its first Community of Practice webinar with the five states (CO, CT, ND, SC and VA) that are being funded by CDC’s Division of Oral Health to implement medical-dental integration projects focusing on diabetes prevention and control, hypertension awareness and early detection, and tobacco use prevention. The webinar focused on evaluation successes, challenges, and anticipated technical assistance needs.

Future webinars will be held quarterly and will feature topics such as communication challenges between dental and medical electronic health records, practice management agreements, clinical workflow redesign examples, and examples of integrated medical and dental services in health systems/settings. In January 2020, NACDD presented a poster at its annual Showcase event on oral health and chronic disease.

NACDD has been invited by the South Carolina Department of Health & Environmental Control to present at their annual Chronic Disease Prevention Symposium in Myrtle Beach, SC, in March 2020. This concurrent session is titled “Could Your Patient’s Teeth be Affecting their Health? Let’s Talk About It!” In April 2020, NACDD will present a Roundtable at the National Oral Health Conference in San Diego, Calif., on medical-dental integration that will feature the work being conducted by the states that are being funded by CDC. Finally, NACDD received notice of a grant award from the North Dakota Department of Health to assist in planning and conducting an Oral Health State Engagement Meeting (StEM) that will take place this summer in Bismarck, ND. The oral health StEM will be modeled after the successful diabetes prevention StEMs that NACDD has helped states conduct since 2012.