PROBLEM: Interprofessional education (IPE) is valued but difficult to deliver, given logistical and other barriers. Centering IPE around patients and grounding it in authentic practice settings are challenging within early undergraduate medical education.

APPROACH: This intervention facilitated student-patient conversations to elicit patient reflections on the health care professionals who keep them healthy and care for them when they are unwell. After being introduced to the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) core competencies, first-year medical (n = 127) and dental (n = 34) students conducted a brief semistructured patient interview, using an interview card with guiding questions, during a precepted outpatient clinic session in March-May 2021. Students transcribed patients' stories and wrote their own reflections on the interview card. These reflections were used as a stimulus for a class IPE discussion. The authors employed a pragmatic qualitative research approach to explore what students learned about interprofessional collaboration from reflecting on patients' stories.

OUTCOMES: Of the 161 students, 158 (98%) completed an interview card. Sixteen health professions were represented in patients' stories. The patients' stories prompted students to recognize and expand their understanding of the IPEC competencies. Students' responses reflected synthesis of the competencies into 3 themes: students value patient-centered holistic care as the goal of interprofessional collaboration; students reflect emerging professional and interprofessional identities in relating to patients, teams, and systems; and students appreciate interprofessional care is complex and challenging, requiring sustained effort and commitment.

NEXT STEPS: Next steps include continuing to integrate patient voices through structured conversations across the undergraduate and graduate medical education spectrum and adapting the model to support conversations with other health professionals engaged in shared patient care. These experiences could foster ongoing deliberate reflection by students on their professional and interprofessional identity development but would require investments in student time and faculty development.

Cross-sector collaborations are alliances among partners from various sectors, including health, education, and business, working together to address complex issues. These alliances are key to addressing inequities in maternal health outcomes. The seven chapters in this section outline examples of successful collaborations, provide information on barriers to, and facilitators of, successful collaboration, or describe opportunities to engage with traditional or nontraditional stakeholders invested in maternal health. Community engagement is also important in building cross-sector collaborations aimed at addressing inequities. The chapters of this section will give readers a better understanding of models for collaborations and community engagement that can be adapted and employed to address inequities in maternal health.

PURPOSE: The annual teaching oral-systemic health (TOSH) virtual clinical simulation and case study activity exposes interprofessional teams of nurse practitioner, nurse midwifery, dental, medical, and pharmacy students to a virtual clinical simulation experience that uses oral-systemic health as a clinical exemplar for promoting interprofessional core competencies. The present study examines changes in participating students' self-reported interprofessional competencies following participation in virtual TOSH from 2020 to 2022. These findings are also compared to those from in-person TOSH (2019) to examine the equivalence of student outcomes of both the in-person and virtual programs. METHODS: A pre- and post-test evaluation design was used to examine the effectiveness of exposure to the TOSH program on self-reported attainment of interprofessional competencies for participating students using the interprofessional collaborative competency attainment scale. RESULTS: Analysis of pre- and post-surveys demonstrated statistically significant improvement in students' self-rated interprofessional experience competencies following the virtual TOSH program, which aligns with results from the in-person cohorts. Similar findings between the in-person and virtual cohorts indicated no statistically significant difference between the two formats. CONCLUSION: These findings demonstrate the success of TOSH in promoting attainment of interprofessional competencies among future health professionals. We encourage administrators and faculty who lead health professional programs to take advantage of using virtual simulations as an integral component of interprofessional oral health clinical experiences where students from different health professions learn from and about each other in assessing and treating patients across the lifespan.

Importance  Process-based quality measures are generally intended to promote evidence-based practices that have been proven to improve outcomes. However, due to lack of standardized implementation of diagnostic codes in dentistry, assessing the association between process and oral health outcomes has been challenging.

Objective  To estimate the association of adhering to dental quality measures with patient oral health outcomes.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Using a target trial emulation, a causal inference framework, this retrospective cohort study estimated the difference in the risk of developing tooth decay between US children who adhered to process-based dental quality measures (receiving topical fluoride and sealant [treated groups]) and those who did not (control groups). Electronic health records of US children and adolescents aged 0 to 18 years from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2020, were used. To emulate random treatment assignment based on baseline confounders, coarsened exact matching was used to produce covariate balance between the treated and control groups. A time-to-event regression model produced effect estimates, adjusting for time-varying covariates. Near-far matching was used to account for unmeasured confounders as a sensitivity analysis. Data were analyzed from May 1 to August 7, 2023.

Exposures  Adherence to dental quality measures.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Incidence of tooth decay.

Results  Among 69 212 US children aged between 0 and 18 years (mean [SD] age, 10.2 [5.0] years; 49.5% male, 50.4% female, and 0.1% unknown or transgender), 1930 (2.8%) were Asian, 2038 (2.9%) were Black, 8667 (12.5%) were Hispanic, 33 632 (48.6%) were White, and 22 945 (33.2%) were multiracial, other, or missing racial and ethnic group identification. Relative to control individuals, treated individuals were more likely to be at elevated risk of caries (fluoride measure: 16 453 [76.5%] vs 15 236 [39.8%]; sealant measure: 2264 [54.6%] vs 997 [44.0%]) and have regular dental visits (fluoride measure: 21 498 [100%] vs 13 741 [35.9%]; sealant measure: 1623 [39.2%] vs 871 [38.4%]). Adherence to quality measures was associated with reduced risk of tooth decay with adjusted hazard ratios of 0.82 (95% CI, 0.78- 0.86) for fluoride and 0.86 (95% CI, 0.76-0.97) for sealant in the matched cohort. Benefits of adhering to quality measures were greater among children at elevated vs low risk and with public vs commercial insurance for both measures.

Conclusions  In this cohort study, adhering to dental quality measures was associated with reduced risk of tooth decay, and benefits were greater among children at elevated risk and with public insurance. These findings provide insights in facilitating targeted application of quality measures or developing more tailored quality improvement initiatives.