Geisinger Receives $35K Grant

• Author: Monica Jackson
• Posted: 2024-02-28

Geisinger Health Systems are a relatively small, regional healthcare business that operates in northern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. While small, however, they are known to be some of the biggest forward-thinkers in the industry, always planning to revolutionize healthcare services for their respective communities. Geisinger is behind a mobile dentistry push amid the health crisis in America, where they will send dentists out to people's locations, in a professional health trailer, to help people with dental issues. For this, the Health Foundation portion of Geisinger received a $35,000 grant from the First Federal Charitable Foundation earlier this week.

$10,000 of the grant will go helping the company launch its mobile dentistry service, while the remaining $25,000 will go toward their LanguageLine InSight Video Interpreting devices. According to a spokesperson from Geisinger, this money is definitely going to help the company move forward in its plans to provide the best healthcare possible to the communities it serves.

The company's Mobile Dentist Unit accomplishes a lot more than people may realize. It actually is a 38-foot professional-grade dentistry laboratory that visits a lot of different community centers and schools and offers a range of treatments from x-rays to cleanings. It's just as much an educational tool for the community as it is a mobile dentist, which is why Geisinger is so proud of it.

One of the reasons that Geisinger was awarded this grant was for their diverse approach to healthcare. The interpreter part of their business, which is still part of their Mobile Dentist Unit, is specifically set up to help the dental team "better understand the patient" who may speak a different language. According to a statement released by Geisinger, the Mobile Dentist Unit's translation software is proficient in 41 different languages and even American and British sign language. With a massively increasing influx of immigration into America this year, a lot of whom end up in places like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Geisinger believes that it's vital to be able to speak their language in order to provide the best possible care to their patients.

There are all sorts of patients who might require mobile dentistry, especially if President Joe Biden decides that we have seen enough in spiking virus cases and decrees that the country be locked down again. While dentists offices are considered essential, the fact is that most people will not want to travel. Not only will states like New Jersey likely pass "shelter in place" orders if America were to lock down again, but most people would be scared to go out and travel anyway. Media's reporting of this virus, and government's insistence on shutting everything down, has a great psychological effect on people and creates a lot of panic.

There are dozens of different dentists' offices in these communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. However, none of them are offering the sort of mobile service that Geisinger provides. It is unclear whether or not the company plans to expand on its Mobile Dentist Unit anytime in the near future. For right now, they seem to be getting along just fine with one unit. Though it would not be surprising to see another one pop up for the company, given how successful their venture is so far.

Mobile Healthcare

There is nothing really new about mobile healthcare. The only practical reason that there aren't a lot more rolling laboratories around out there is that serious medical procedures cannot be performed. For instance, Geisinger's Mobile Dentist Unit is fine for educational purposes, diagnosing issues, and things like cleaning, but they're not drilling into the mouth and doing root canals inside of a glorified RV. The same goes for all sorts of medical procedures. For instance, you find in many small towns and big cities around the USA these sorts of mobile units that provide heart screenings, looking for problems. Though when they do find a problem, they refer the patient to a hospital and don't treat it there.

More so than liability reasons or any sort of government regulations, it's the size limitations and the one-room capacity of mobile units that make it impractical if not impossible to use for a broader span of healthcare services. For instance, in hospitals, you have multiple nurses and doctors assisting one another, which is impractical in a trailer due to size limitations. There are also separate rooms and a whole lot of separate machines for different procedures. They simply would not fit in a rolling lab. Nevertheless, it's a good thing for the residents to have a mobile dentist handy.