Shasta Community Health Center

Shasta Community Health Center serves a rural region where recruiting and retaining dentists is an ongoing, often losing battle. When its last dental providers left, the department closed entirely.

The challenge

The waiting list kept growing after the closure. Medical staff saw patients with oral infections and had no referral options, so antibiotics stood in for dental care. And like most health centers, Shasta operated under real financial pressure: the average FQHC runs at a negative 2.1 percent EBITDA.

The approach

OroMed integrated preventive dental evaluations into Shasta’s existing medical visits, with no on-site dentists required. The team also did extensive community outreach to build relationships with local dental providers who accept Medi-Cal, creating a working referral network across the region: patients get evaluated at their medical visit and then have somewhere to go.

The results

The program now operates across six Shasta sites, restoring preventive dental access in a region that had lost it.