Washington — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Oral Health has launched a new initiative to create a national framework for medical-dental integration.
In September, the CDC awarded funding to the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors to develop a national framework for medical-dental integration. The framework “will outline opportunities to integrate medical and dental services in different health care and public health settings to support populations with unmet oral health needs and associated chronic diseases,” according to an Oct. 15 email from the division. The first year of the project “will focus on examining current programmatic and clinical medical-dental integration strategies.”
The CDC email also said the agency is investing resources in Colorado, Connecticut, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia to improve oral health outcomes to implement medical-dental integration projects over the next five years of the initiative.