Over the past two weeks, AGD leadership held virtual meetings with Senior Administration Health Officials to discuss AGD’s advocacy priorities and opportunities for collaboration and federal engagement. AGD leadership met with Dr. Natalia Chalmers, the Chief Dental Officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS officials discussed their priorities and concerns related to trends in access to oral health care and shared information about a newly launched oral health initiative in which 13 states are working with CMS to apply a quality improvement lens for primary care referrals to dental care and dental care referrals to specialty care. More information about this campaign will be shared at the 2023 CMS Quality Conference.

AGD leaders also met with Dr. Adam Barefoot, the Chief Dental Officer at the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA). In this meeting, Dr. Barefoot and his colleagues described the recent launch of HRSA’s A Healthy Mouth for Every Body campaign, which aims to provide educational materials and resources to help families achieve good oral health and healthy oral habits. AGD leadership and HRSA officials discussed opportunities for collaboration to promote the campaign and spread awareness of issues related to oral health. The campaign website can be found here. A toolkit for stakeholders with shareable resources on oral health can be found here. 

Impact on General Dentistry: AGD will leverage these relationships to further its legislative and regulatory priorities. AGD has been a strong advocate for the oral health literacy program unveiled by HRSA and will continue to push for legislation to increase funding to expand the program.

AGD Advocacy Highlights from 2022
AGD was very active advocating for the general dentist in 2022, including obtaining funding for HRSA’s oral health literacy campaign and contributing to the success of Massachusetts Ballot Question 2 that instituted an 83% loss ratio on dental insurers.  More highlights can be found here.