# Economic Evaluation of School-Based Caries Prevention Programs

> **NIH NIH K25** · NEW YORK UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $59,418

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
 The primary goal of this project is to improve oral health care delivery and reduce health inequities by
conducting robust program evaluations to support decision-making during the pandemic by policymakers and
stakeholders. To achieve this goal, the proposed study’s primary objective is to assess how pre-pandemic
access to school-based caries prevention programs (SCPPs) affect children’s dental and dental-related care
utilization and exposure to environments with high or very high COVID-19 exposure risk levels during the
pandemic. This will be done by leveraging (1) a unique data linkage introduced in the original K-25 grant in
tandem with (2) a natural experiment caused by unexpected SCPP service schedule interruptions from the
pandemic that approximates randomization to pre-pandemic SCPP access and no pre-pandemic access
across participating schools. This overcomes site selection bias concerns faced by prior evaluations of school-
based programs more generally, whereby schools choosing to participate in school-based programs may be
different from those choosing to opt out in ways affecting the observed outcomes of school-based programs.
 In support of this research, Dr. Shulamite S. Huang is applying for an administrative supplement to her
funded K-25 award. Dr. Huang, a health economist specializing in the study of the dental market at New York
University’s College of Dentistry (NYU COD), is establishing herself as a young investigator in oral health
services research. This award will allow Dr. Huang to further work towards reducing health disparities and
improving health care delivery and quality by integrating her background and experience in health economics
and policy evaluation with clinical research methods and evaluation of clinical interventions.
 In Aim 1, Dr. Huang will determine how trends in dental and dental-related medical utilization have
changed among vulnerable children, before and during the pandemic. In particular, she will assess whether
any changes in dental-related emergency department visits are indicative of increasing numbers and
increasing severity of unmet dental needs during the pandemic. In Aim 2, Dr. Huang will quantify the impact of
pre-pandemic SCPP access on dental and dental-related medical utilization during the pandemic relative to no
pre-pandemic SCPP access. This research will serve to further establish Dr. Huang as a oral health services
researcher that brings causal inference methods from the field of economics, as well as novel large dataset
linkages, to study the impact of changes in dental care delivery on large populations.
 As in the original K-25 award, Dr. Huang continues to be supported by a mentoring team comprised of
a primary mentor, Dr. Heather Gold, an expert in population health research and economic evaluations of
clinical & behavioral interventions and Professor at NYU Langone Health and School of Medicine; and one co-
mentor, Dr. Richard Niederman, a dentist and...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10295465
- **Project number:** 3K25DE028584-02S1
- **Recipient organization:** NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Shulamite S Huang
- **Activity code:** K25 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $59,418
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2019-09-01 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10295465

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10295465, Economic Evaluation of School-Based Caries Prevention Programs (3K25DE028584-02S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10295465. Licensed CC0.

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