Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/777540
12 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine For low-income families, even a trip to the dentist for the children can come at a challenging cost, but these are costs that can be avoided. Christina Scherrer, professor of systems and industrial en- gineering at Kennesaw State University, worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Division of Oral Health on an 18-month study exploring the cost-effective- ness of school-based dental sealant programs, examining the outcome among children, with and without sealants, and the number of cavities acquired at the end of four years. Dental sealants are resin-based material applied to chil- dren's permanent teeth to prevent decay. Scherrer, who said she pursues "solving public problems" through industrial engineering, focused on mathematical modeling to determine whether cost savings from future cavities and productivity losses from parents leaving work to take their child to the dentist outweighed the costs of run- ning school-based dental sealant programs. "A number of states do school-based programs, where a team of dental professionals will come in and provide sealants to all of the children in the school," she said in an interview with ISE magazine. "And that's a very cost-effective way to do that. If you look at it from an industrial engineering standpoint, you can reach a lot of people in a high through- put for putting these sealants on." As part of a school-based dental sealant program, licensed dental providers, with parental permission, apply the sealants on students for free during the school day. The program typi- cally bills public or private insurance where available to cover some of the cost. "The problem is that most children in low-income families can't get to a dentist," Scherrer said. "There are not enough dentists to take enough Medicaid patients, so these students typically don't have the opportunity to have the sealant put on their teeth." She added that the research team ultimately was able to show that based on likely future billing to Medicaid for chil- dren without sealant who would've had to have their teeth pulled or visit an emergency room because of dental pain, the preventive costs more than covered the costs of providing such programs to schools in areas with low-income families. "It's always a scarce resource to have [public] money to pay for these programs. We're able to show that an investment now in sealing these children's teeth will pay out in the fu- ture and that Medicaid would pay less for these children. But you still need to have the money now to pay for it." Scherrer said that, so far, the professional dental commu- nity has responded kindly. "With this [study] being published a couple of different places, we did get a couple of different emails from dentists who work among low-income populations. They think this is great work and were very excited about it, which is really cool. And sometimes, the CDC has close partnerships with these programs, so the state dental programs that provide ser- vices like this, we typically hear back from them in apprecia- tion of what we're doing." News from the field The front line Breaking the dental jam Research finds preventive sealant programs for children can be cost-effective Christina Scherrer Photo courtesy David Caselli/Kennesaw State University