With generous funding and support from the DentaQuest Foundation, Northeastern University Bouvé College of Health Sciences established the Innovations in Oral Health (IOH) Program to help prepare students across multiple health professions to enter their practices ready and willing to recognize the oral health needs of their patients and collaborate with dental professionals to address those needs.

At the launch of the IOH Program in 2013, organizers convened an Oral Health Summit where over 125 health professionals, funders, policymakers, faculty, students, and community leaders from across New England gathered to address systems change for improving oral health. Their collective wisdom was distilled into a core set of guiding principles that influenced the development of program activities and initiatives. Those principles included:

• Embrace a network mindset and engage in collaborative leadership to advance interprofessional education and practice in oral health.
• Promote experiential learning innovations linking oral health education and practice.
• Partner with communities of practice to promote integration of oral health and primary care.
• Develop student leadership and advocacy for oral health to achieve health equity.

These principles, combined with the DentaQuest Foundation’s Oral Health 2020 vision to “improve lifelong oral health and eradicate dental disease in children,” served as common ground from which to advance interprofessional education and practice across health professions and promote medical-dental collaboration.

In the two years that followed, educators at the Bouvé College of Health Sciences implemented a series of programs and activities aimed at integrating oral health throughout the curricula within their college. The IOH Toolkit is the culmination of these initiatives. It provides a roadmap for engaging all health care providers in oral health surveillance and strengthening educational resources to support oral health integration across the health professions.