Dental population health measures: supporting Army transformation

General Eric K. Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army, has initiated the transformation of the Army with the goals of making the force more lethal, agile, and versatile. A key component to the transformation is deploying healthier soldiers that will result in the ability to decrease the amount of deployed medical support. This article describes two new population health measures the U.S. Army Dental Command is implementing to support the transformation. The new program will make it mandatory for dental providers to assess caries and tobacco risk at all active duty soldiers' annual dental examinations. These measures will allow the dental personnel to identify who is at risk for future disease and then to plan appropriate prevention strategies for those individual soldiers. These aggregate corporate data will allow dental leaders to target prevention services to the units with a high percentage of tobacco users. These new measures and the resultant prevention strategies can increase the readiness of our forces and can result in a healthier and mission-ready force.