At Centro Medico Community Health Center, an FQHC serving the McArthur Park neighborhood in Los Angeles they had a problem, but they also had a vision of integrated oral healthcare. They knew dental need existed within their community but they couldn’t figure out how best to access it. They decided to move one of their dentists off the normal treatment schedule to see patients specifically for oral screening. That identified the need but it also took that dentist away from treating existing patients.
With OroMed integrating directly into the medical visit at Centro Medico, they’ve been able to complete more than 6,400 preventive dental evaluations, with an 80% acceptance rate among eligible patients. It also reported a 150% increase in patients seen and an 83% increase in dental encounters, reaching its initial goals within five months of the start of the program and surpassing those original targets within 18 months.
Those results show what integrated oral healthcare can look like when it is designed around the realities of a community health center. For Centro Medico, expanding access could not simply mean adding more responsibility to a dental team already operating at capacity. It required a model that could increase preventive access while allowing existing clinical resources to remain focused on treatment.
That challenge is central to the thinking Dr. Agopian has brought to OroMed. His work as Chief Clinical Officer has helped shape a model focused not simply on providing another dental service, but on finding practical ways to make preventive oral healthcare more accessible within existing systems of care. It is a philosophy that reflects a larger part of OroMed’s mission: helping community health centers connect more patients with preventive oral health services without creating unnecessary barriers for patients or additional strain on clinical teams.
Making Oral Healthcare More Accessible
Access to care is about more than whether a service exists. It is also about whether patients can realistically reach and use that service. For community health centers, patients may already be coming through the door for primary care and other health services, yet oral healthcare can still exist, siloed in a separate part of the system, requiring another appointment, another workflow, or another point of entry.
Integrated oral healthcare creates an opportunity to rethink that experience. Rather than relying entirely on patients to independently enter the traditional dental system, preventive oral health services can become more closely connected to the care environments patients already use. For Dr. Agopian and OroMed, that approach is grounded in the belief that innovation should make care easier to access and easier to deliver. A new model is most valuable when it works within the realities of the health center, supports the people providing care, and creates a clearer path for patients.
Designing Around the Realities of Community Health Centers
Community health centers operate in complex environments. Leaders must consider access, quality, staffing, provider capacity, patient demand, and sustainability at the same time. That means a new healthcare model needs to succeed within a complex operational system of care.
This is where healthcare leadership and clinical experience become particularly important. Leaders need to understand not only what they want to improve, but what is happening inside the organization that may be limiting progress. Can a new service work with the existing team? Will it disrupt clinical workflows? Does it create additional work for providers? How will patients move through the process? And, most importantly, does it meaningfully expand access?
Those are the very questions that Dr. Agopian set out to answer in designing OroMed’s integrative approach to preventive oral care. Instead of asking community health centers to build an entirely separate infrastructure around preventive oral health, the model he helped design integrates into existing care environments and creates additional capacity. The experience at Centro Medico Community Health Center shows what that can look like in practice.
From Vision to Practice at Centro Medico
When it was time to put OroMed’s integration into practice at Centro Medico Community Health Center, OroMed’s leadership recognized it’s unique challenges: demand was there, but capacity was limited. The department was operating at capacity, and preventive oral evaluations were consuming staff resources that could otherwise be directed toward treatment.
Centro Medico’s goal was to increase the number of patients its dental team could serve each day, but reaching that goal required more than simply adding appointments to the schedule. The organization needed to address the systems around care.
OroMed also provided another piece of the solution. The virtual model developed for Centro Medico moved preventive dental evaluations outside of the traditional dental team workflow and into the medical workflow. Those evaluations could be completed without adding staff or requiring workflow modifications, allowing the dental department to focus more of its existing capacity on treatment. It was oral healthcare designed around the realities of the organization rather than asking the organization to redesign itself around the technology.
Integrated Care Requires More Than Technology
Technology can make new models of healthcare possible, but technology alone does not create integration. A virtual dental evaluation, screening platform, or other digital tool only becomes meaningful when it fits into a larger system of care.
That requires leaders to think about what happens before, during, and after the technology is used. How does a patient enter the process? What happens when a potential need is identified? How does the dental team receive the information it needs? And how does the model support rather than complicate the work already happening inside the health center? These questions are part of what distinguishes technology adoption from genuine healthcare integration.
For OroMed, the goal is not to introduce technology for its own sake. It is to use technology as part of a practical model that can support prevention, increase access, and work alongside existing clinical teams. Centro Medico provides a clear example. The virtual component mattered because it addressed a specific operational problem: preventive evaluations were using limited dental capacity. By moving those evaluations into a different model, the organization could redirect its existing resources toward treatment while continuing to identify preventive needs. The technology supported the strategy. It did not replace it.
Leadership Vision Becomes Operational Structure
The strongest healthcare missions eventually have to become systems. A commitment to access has to influence how patients enter care. A commitment to prevention has to influence where and when screenings happen. A commitment to supporting providers has to influence workflows and staffing decisions.
This is where Dr. Agopian’s influence on OroMed’s model becomes especially relevant. The vision behind integrated oral healthcare is not simply to make more services available. It is to build those services in a way that recognizes the operational realities of community health centers and the needs of the people they serve. At Centro Medico, that meant creating a model capable of increasing preventive access while giving the existing dental department more capacity for treatment.
The result connects directly back to the larger OroMed mission: make preventive integrated oral healthcare more accessible by bringing it into the healthcare environments patients already trust.
Building the Future of Oral Healthcare Around Access
Community health centers have always been built around access. They serve communities where removing barriers to care can make a meaningful difference in patients’ lives. As healthcare evolves, the models used to expand that access can evolve as well.
Integrated oral healthcare offers one path forward. By connecting preventive dental services with existing care environments, health centers can create additional opportunities to identify patient needs while making more effective use of clinical capacity. Dr. Agopian’s work in shaping OroMed’s approach reflects the philosophy behind that model: meaningful innovation should solve a real problem for both the patient and the organization delivering care.
The experience at Centro Medico shows what that philosophy can look like when translated into practice. Preventive evaluations were moved outside the traditional dental workflow, the dental team gained capacity to focus on treatment, and more patients were able to access care.
For OroMed, that is ultimately where mission, leadership, and innovation come together. The goal is not simply to introduce a different way of delivering oral healthcare. It is to help community health centers create practical pathways to prevention that work for their patients, their teams, and the communities they serve.
To explore how OroMed can support your organization’s approach to integrated oral healthcare, book a discovery call with our team.