5.5 ODH-Funded Program Requirements

Data Management

Sealant program data are necessary for program operations, accountability, and reporting to funders and others. Data collection begins with the consent form, which also serves as a questionnaire for the parent or guardian. ODH has available a sample consent form containing basic information that the department requires. For example, all programs must ask a question about race using the required choices for parent/guardian response. Needed data must be transferred from the hard-copy consent form to a spreadsheet or another database and then aggregated and outputted.

ODH does not require funded programs to use a particular data-entry system or database for managing sealant program data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed Sealant Efficiency Assessment for Locals and States (SEALS), a spreadsheet program for inputting, analyzing, and reporting sealant program data. To date, ODH has not adopted SEALS. SEALS software allows school-based sealant programs to estimate their effectiveness and efficiency. Data is entered into SEALS for each school sealant event. SEALS and its accompanying package, SEALS_Admin, generates reports for each school, for programs (combines data across schools served by a single program), and for the state (combines data across programs funded by a state). SEALS reports include the following information: (1) sociodemographic information on the population a program serves, (2) basic screening survey indicators, (3) summary measures on whether the program is sealing high-risk teeth (e.g., tooth type and estimated caries attack rate without the program), (4) a summary of services delivered by the program, (5) a summary indicator of quality (e.g., retention rate, number of prevented caries, referrals, referral success rate), and (6) indicators of efficiency (e.g., program cost to prevent one cavity, number of children sealed per chair hour). SEALS software is available free of charge from CDC. Training and limited support are also available from CDC. Currently, SEALS software is not capable of producing invoices for third-party payers such as Medicaid.

The patient record contains the results of the dentist’s findings and the sealant treatment plan for each child. The record also provides a place for the dental sealant team to document sealants placed. ODH has available a sample patient record with a key to be used for coding surfaces of the teeth targeted for sealant placement. The patient record provides a large portion of the data reported to ODH.

Often, the person entering data into ODH’s required reports is not a member of the dental sealant team and may not fully understand what the information represents. Therefore, ODH has provided a sample screening/sealant-placement data-collection form to be completed for each school by the sealant team. The form was developed to help the person entering data into ODH’s reporting system easily determine where to record these data.

BACK

NEXT