Castle Family Health Centers
Case Study
Castle Family Health Centers was doing what community health centers do, caring for patients across their medical programs and doing it well. What they didn’t know was how much dental need was walking through their doors unseen. They had no formal screening program, and no data. OroMed changed that. What began as a careful six-month pilot became a proof point for why preventive dental care belongs at the center of whole-person health.
The Challenge
Castle Family Health Centers knew their patients needed dental care. What they didn’t know was how much. With no dental director, no dental leadership structure, and no formal program to screen patients coming through their medical visits, the scale of unmet dental need in their community was largely invisible. Patients were arriving at medical appointments with oral health conditions that went unidentified and unaddressed.
Access to Medi-Cal dental care in the communities Castle serves is limited, particularly for adults, who face the greatest barriers to finding providers who accept their coverage. Castle wanted to do more for these patients. They needed a partner who could show them what more actually looked like.
The Approach
OroMed began with a structured six-month pilot at Castle’s largest clinic, a facility set inside a former military hospital with a hallway-based layout and a highly individualized provider workflow. Rather than rolling out org-wide from day one, OroMed worked with six providers across two hallways to design an integration that fit the specific rhythm of that clinic.
Provider buy-in was the critical variable. Some providers were initially concerned that adding a dental screening step would slow down appointments. OroMed addressed this directly, bringing in clinical leadership to sit with the provider team, share the screening data already collected, and make the clinical case for why this mattered. Seeing real patients from their own practice, patients with urgent dental needs and in some cases potential oral cancer lesions identified through OroMed screenings, changed the conversation.
Once providers understood what was being missed, they became more flexible about when and how screenings could happen. The breakthrough: OroMed screenings now take place during the natural gap when a patient is waiting for their provider to enter the room. No additional time added. No workflow disruption. The gap that used to be dead time became the moment preventive dental care entered the visit.
After the pilot succeeded, the program expanded to all three Castle sites.
The Result
Now mature across three sites, Castle’s OroMed program is delivering preventive dental access at scale, with a patient volume that reflects both the depth of the need and the strength of the integration.
What the data doesn’t fully capture: before OroMed, Castle had no visibility into the dental health of the patients walking through their doors. Now they do. And what they’re seeing: the urgent needs, the early-stage lesions, the patients who would have gone without care, has fundamentally changed how Castle thinks about its role in its community’s health.
13-15
Preventive dental evaluations per day, per site, with the highest-volume site reaching 20–25/day
2972
Total patients seen through OroMed integration, Jan–Apr 2026, the highest patient volume of any client in the OroMed network.
75%
Capture rate: eligible patients receiving a preventive dental evaluation at their medical visit.
