For Shasta Community Health Center, maintaining preventive dental access had become increasingly difficult. The health center serves a rural region where recruiting and retaining dentists was an ongoing challenge. When all but one of its dental providers left, the dental department was left with just one dentist serving eight locations. But the need for dental care did not disappear.
The waiting list continued to grow, and patients with oral infections were still coming through Shasta’s medical services. With limited dental capacity and few reliable referral options, medical teams had limited places to send them. Antibiotics became a temporary response in situations where patients ultimately needed dental treatment.
Shasta needed another way to connect patients with oral healthcare while working within the realities of a persistent workforce shortage.
When Losing Providers Becomes an Access Problem
For rural community health centers, recruiting dental providers can be difficult enough. Retaining them over time can create another challenge entirely. When access depends on having dentists physically available within the health center, the departure of even a small number of providers can have an immediate effect on patients.
Shasta experienced that vulnerability firsthand. With only one dentist serving eight locations, patients no longer had the same pathway into dental care. Meanwhile, oral health need was still prevelant in their patient community.
Rather than waiting until the organization could rebuild the preventive dental access structure it had before, Shasta began looking for another place within the health center where preventive oral healthcare could begin.
Creating Another Path to Preventive Dental Access
Shasta partnered with OroMed to integrate preventive dental evaluations into the medical visits patients were already attending. The model did not require an on-site dentist to conduct those evaluations. OroMed’s model comes with its own telehealth dental providers, MAs trained on OroMed’s screening workflow, a custom tech stack, a 40+ person admin team handling eligibility and scheduling, etc. This model freed up Shasta’s dentist to continue treating patients.
Preventive dental evaluations done within the medical visit meant an oral health need could be identified without first gaining access to an on-site dentist, which could take months or even longer. For the health center, existing medical encounters became an opportunity to reconnect patients with preventive dental care while the larger workforce challenge remained.
The approach did not ask medical teams to become dental providers, nor did it remove the need for dentists to provide treatment. Instead, it created a connection between the healthcare setting patients were already accessing and the dental care they might need next.
Identifying Need Was Only Half of the Solution
Creating preventive evaluations addressed one part of Shasta’s challenge, but identifying an oral health need had limited value if patients still had nowhere to go afterward.
OroMed conducted community outreach to develop relationships with local dental providers accepting Medi-Cal. The goal was to create a regional referral network alongside the preventive evaluation model so that identifying a need could lead to a practical next step.
The two pieces worked together. Medical visits created an opportunity for preventive dental evaluations, while the referral network gave patients a pathway toward follow-up dental care. And through the OroMed program, Shasta started generating much needed revenue that went back into building out their dental department once again.
For community health centers considering integrated oral healthcare, that connection is important. Expanding evaluation capacity without considering referral capacity can leave an organization with more information about unmet need but few additional ways to help patients address it.
Building Around the Workforce Shasta Actually Had
Shasta’s dental workforce shortage could not be solved simply by changing a workflow. Recruiting and retaining dentists remained a challenge, particularly in the rural communities the organization serves.
Integrating preventive dental evaluations into existing medical visits allowed Shasta to begin rebuilding access without first requiring an on-site dentist at every participating location. Dental professionals remained essential for treatment, but the first opportunity to identify a preventive oral health need was no longer dependent entirely on access to the traditional dental department.
For community health centers facing similar workforce pressures, this is an important consideration when evaluating how to expand rural dental care with limited provider capacity. Designing around the workforce currently available can create additional pathways to preventive care while recruitment efforts continue.
What Happened When the Model Expanded
Shasta’s approach eventually moved beyond a single location. The program now operates across all eight sites, creating preventive dental access across a larger portion of the health center’s service area.
From January through April 2026, 3,170 patients were seen through the program. Participating sites averaged approximately nine preventive dental evaluations per day, and 69% of eligible patients received an evaluation during their medical visit.
Those results reflect more than the number of evaluations completed. Shasta went from losing almost all of its dental providers to creating a preventive pathway across eight locations.
What Shasta’s Experience Means for Other Community Health Centers
Shasta’s circumstances are specific to the communities it serves, but the larger challenge is not unique. Rural communities continue to face dental workforce shortages, making traditional models of oral healthcare more difficult to sustain.
Shasta’s experience offers another way to approach that challenge. The health center did not wait for every staffing issue to be resolved before creating a new preventive pathway. Instead, it looked at where patients were already receiving care, how oral health needs could be identified during those encounters, and what community relationships were necessary to help patients move forward.
Geography, staffing, referral availability, patient populations, and organizational resources vary considerably among health centers. The broader lesson is that restoring access does not always require recreating exactly what existed before. But it’s worth mentioning again that Shasta is now rebuilding it’s dental department from the revenue generated from OroMed’s integration.
Creating a More Connected Path to Preventive Oral Healthcare
Rural dental workforce shortages are unlikely to be solved by a single program or technology. Shasta’s experience does, however, show how preventive oral health pathways can be built around the healthcare encounters and resources already available.
By integrating greater preventive dental access into medical visits and developing relationships with local dental providers accepting Medi-Cal, Shasta created a model that connects patients with oral healthcare through resources already present in the community. The program now operates across eight sites and has reached thousands of patients, even while the realities of rural dental recruitment remain.
For OroMed, the goal is to help community health centers strengthen preventive dental access by creating connections that reflect the realities of the populations and organizations they serve. Shasta’s story demonstrates what that can look like when a health center builds a new pathway around the patients, providers, and resources already within reach.
To see how OroMed can support a more integrated approach to preventive oral health within your organization, schedule a personalized call with our team so we can answer your questions.