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Apple Tree Institute

Apple Treee Dental works to improve dental access in two major ways:

  • Provide dental services to people who face economic, physical, or developmental barrers to care
  • Collaborate with others to fix the root causes of poor oral health in our country.

The Apple Tree Institute is the branch of Apple Tree Dental that works to improving the dental healthcare system. Institute projects involve areas such as education, advocacy, clinical innovation, dental policy, and research in collaboration with other organizations and individuals.

Institute Projects

Oral Healthcare Solutions Project

Apple Tree led a collaborative effort to create a new healthcare system model that improved patient outcomes while reducing state funded healthcare costs. The Oral Healthcare Solutions Project was a landmark collaboration involving 50 healthcare and community partners.  The model developed emphasized oral health education, prevention and screening services to at-risk populations at the earliest possible time - before children, adults and elders suffered he consequences of dental infections and needed more expensive and traumatic dental treatment, emergency room visits or hospitalizations.

Research

Advances in dentistry have allowed each generation of Americans to keep their natural teeth for longer periods, but little research has focused on the special needs of the long-tem care population. Apple Tree's oral health database includes diagnostic and treatment data on more than 20,000 patients, and has been used for several research projects and publications. For instance, Dr. Drew Smith, a University of Minnesota graduate student, analyzed 1993 clinical data based on 3,479 patients in 36 facilities. He found that over 75% of patients with natural teeth had urgent dental problems. In 1997, Dr. Paul Thai won a national award in a scientific paper competition using information from Apple Tree's database. His paper entitled, "Nurses' Dental Assessments and Subsequent Care in Minnesota Nursing Homes" was published in Special Care in Dentistry. Dr. Barbara Smith wrote a paper of the stability of oral health status in a long-term care population.

Dental Care Delivery Innovations

Bringing dental equipment into nursing homes, Head Start centers, or other community facilities has always been challenging. Most dental equipment, scheduling software, and even dental billing codes are designed with fixed dental clinics in mind. In order to bring care where it is needed most, Apple Tree has pioneered many aspects of dental care delivery. For more information, see our page on Clinical Innovations.