Development of a Children's Dental Surveillance System
Keith Heller, Principal Investigator
10/1/99-10/01/02

The major purpose of this project was to develop a children's oral health surveillance system that will be used to assess the oral health of the children in Genesee County, Michigan. This surveillance system is used to assist in the development, implementation, and evaluation of necessary fluoride-based, sealant, educational, and other oral health prevention programs in the county. A specific aim of this project was to collect children's oral health information from four different sources and compare these findings to determine the cost, validity, and utility of each source of the data. The four data sources are:

1. Data from already on-going Genesee County elementary school oral health surveys,

2. Clinical data from Mott Children's Health Center (a private community based clinic providing dental care to low-income children in Flint, MI) utilizing their computer-based records system,

3. State of Michigan Medicaid and MICHILD electronically stored claims data, and

4. Data from Delta Dental Plan of Michigan (DDPM) insurance claims files.

Data from all the sources included information on restorative treatment, while caries status was only ascertained from the school survey and clinical record data sources. Clinical and claims data was compare to the gold-standard school survey data. Data was analyzed by communities (school districts), allowing us to see how the different data characterizes the oral health status of particular communities in the country. A secondary aim of this project was to determine which clinical measures (e.g. multisurface restorations, prematurely missing teeth, caries status, etc.) are valid and useful for measuring a community's oral health status. These data was used to develop an efficient and valid surveillance system that Mott Children's Health Center can use to identify communities in Genesee County requiring the implementation of fluoride-based, sealant, educational, and other oral health prevention programs. From these data, rankings of the oral health needs of the communities can be generated. It is expected that the results from this project will be useful in assisting other communities to develop similar surveillance systems both for children and adults. In particular, the Genesee County Community Board is interested in addressing adult oral health needs. If the DDPM provide useful and valid surveillance measures for children, then we will use these data to identify Genesee County communities with adult oral health needs that need to be addressed.

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