Dental Care Programs in High-Income Countries

We only included those dental care plans/programs that provided dental care interventions of some form, whether privately (e.g., enrolling in a dental program based on certain eligibility criteria) or through public funding (e.g., expansion of Medicare and Medicaid to include dental services) with the aim to improve oral health outcomes. We only included studies conducted in high-income countries according to the World Bank data based on their respective gross national income (GNI) [31 ]. For systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which included studies from all income countries, we specifically included only those from high-income countries; however, if country information was missing, we included it to avoid missing potential evidence. Other inclusion criteria were studies that assessed outcomes at the individual and/or family level and that were available in English and published after 1999. We excluded studies that were purely qualitative in nature, assessed isolated dental interventions without being part of any project or a program, focused on population level interventions (e.g., water fluoridation and tobacco cessation programs), grey literature, conference abstracts, and preprints. Furthermore, to accommodate the nature of our research question, we limited our inclusion of oral health education (OHE) programs to those geared toward patient populations (i.e., excluded studies where educational programs were targeting healthcare providers such as physicians, nurses, etc.). No other restrictions were placed on sample size, targeted populations, age, study design, or the types of services included in the program.