Shasta Community Health Center
Case Study
When OroMed first engaged with Shasta Community Health Center, their dental department wasn’t struggling, it was shuttered. They had a waiting list with no path forward. What followed was one of the most meaningful partnerships in the OroMed network, not just restoring access to care, but building the infrastructure to sustain it in a region that had been without it for far too long.
The Challenge
Shasta Community Health Center operates in a rural region where recruiting and retaining dentists is an ongoing, often losing battle. Dental providers prefer larger cities and more stable practice environments. Shasta’s geographic isolation made it nearly impossible to maintain a consistent dental workforce, and when their last providers left, the department shut down entirely. The waiting list grew. Patients who needed dental care had nowhere to go.
The consequences reached beyond the dental chair. Medical providers were seeing patients with abscesses and acute oral infections but had no referral pathway to send them to. Prescribing antibiotics was the only tool available, a temporary fix that addressed the symptom but not the cause. Whole-person care was not possible when one of the most prevalent and painful health needs a patient could present with had no local answer.
Shasta was also facing the financial reality common across community health centers: the average FQHC operates at a -2.1% EBITDA, losing money year over year while trying to serve their communities. Shasta needed to find ways to expand patient access and build more sustainable operations without compromising their mission. A shuttered dental department was a problem on every dimension, clinical, operational, and financial.
The Approach
OroMed’s entry point was the medical visit. By integrating preventive dental evaluations into the workflow patients were already part of, OroMed was able to restore dental access at Shasta without requiring Shasta to first solve its provider recruitment problem. The screenings didn’t depend on having a dentist on staff, OroMed brought the dental expertise directly to patients.
Equally important was what OroMed built outside the clinic. The OroMed team conducted extensive community research, visiting clinics across the region, traveling miles from Shasta’s sites, to find Medi-Cal-accepting dental providers willing to accept referrals. This was not a quick online search. It was legwork: meeting with providers, explaining the program, and building relationships that didn’t exist before. The result: a network of two to three local dental providers who now receive urgent referrals from Shasta’s medical team.
For the first time, when a medical provider at Shasta saw a patient with an abscess or an acute infection, they had somewhere to send them. Instead of prescribing antibiotics and hoping for the best, providers could refer patients to someone who could actually treat them. This referral infrastructure was not a workaround. It was the foundation of a functional dental access system in a region that didn’t have one.
The Result
From a completely shuttered dental department to one of the largest patient volumes in the OroMed network, Shasta’s transformation reflects what becomes possible when access to care is rebuilt from the ground up.
Shasta went from zero dental access to one of the largest patient volumes in the OroMed network, across six sites, serving a rural community that had been without consistent dental care for far too long. Medical providers now have a referral pathway for urgent dental needs. Patients who presented with pain, infection, and untreated oral disease now have somewhere to go.
This is what it looks like when access to care is rebuilt from the ground up.
~9
Preventive dental evaluations per day, per site (YTD average).
3170
Total patients seen through OroMed integration, Jan–Apr 2026.
69%
Capture rate: eligible patients receiving a preventive dental evaluation at their medical visit.
