Establishes a dental health demonstration project in the county of Monroe

Showing the cosponsors who are on Agora, A to Z. The official record may list more.

• Democratic2
• Republican1

This bill has cosponsors from more than one party.

Shown in neutral colors by design; Agora is non-partisan.

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Jeremy Cooney says this is needed

The American Dental Association estimates that about one third of people in the U.S. won't see a dentist this year due to a variety of barriers to care. When it comes to children, tooth decay is the single most preventable chronic childhood disease. Tooth decay impacts academic performance, a leading cause of absenteeism. Children nationwide miss almost 52 million school hours each year because of dental problem. Limited access to dental care disproportionately affects marginalized and low-income communities, significantly impacting residents' overall health. This inequity places a substantial burden on the medical system as untreated oral diseases result in pain, infection, and emergency room visits. As one of the very few dental providers left who accepts Medicaid as a form of insurance, the University of Rochester's Eastman Institute for Oral Health has taken on the enormous challenge to try to ensure all can receive the critical dental care they need. However, currently, at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, the wait time for care is staggering: 9,000 adults on the waitlist for general dentistry care; over 900 chil- dren for Pediatric Dentistry Operating Room (OR); and over 1,000 people on the waitlist for Special Needs OR and IV sedation. The waiting times exceed 2-3 years. Scientists at the University of Rochester's Computer Science Department and Eastman Institute for Oral Health, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, has developed a smartphone app that can detect tooth decay. The primary goal of the app is to create supportive environments outside the traditional dental care setting, empower community self-care by reorienting health services from curative to preventive, and to use Al technology to achieve population-wide dental screening and early detection, ultimately reducing the severity of tooth decay and dental disease-related emergencies. Currently, the SMARTeeth app is being used at the University of Rochester's Lattimore Health & Wellness, where Community Health Workers employed by the University of Rochester take pictures of a patient's teeth, detect what is happening, and, working with a dentist, provide an assessment, education, and risk assessment to the patient. They have been working with 200 pregnant women in the Lattimore office. They are receiving reimbursement for the role of the Community Health Worker, but they are not receiving reimbursement for the diagnostic work done. This legislation seeks to create a five-year demonstration program in Monroe County where diagnostic services associated with the use of the SMARTeeth app would be reimbursed. Such diagnostic services will include clinical services to treat existing dental problems, testing, self-di- rect imagery or patient encounters. The target population for the demon- stration project would be pregnant persons and those persons who are postpartum twelve months afterbirth.

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.