Sealant Efficiency Assessment for Locals and States (SEALS)

SEALS software helps states and communities evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their school dental sealant programs. As part of a comprehensive package that includes technical support and data collection forms, the Excel-based software automates

• The capture, storage, and analysis of data on the oral health status of participating children.
• The types and numbers of services delivered at school events.
• The costs and logistics of events, e.g., personnel, equipment, materials, and travel.

Examples of summary and performance measures generated by SEALS are cost per child receiving sealants, sealant retention, averted caries, and number of children sealed per chair-hour. These measures are available on reports generated for three levels of analysis:

• The summary and performance measures for a single school sealant event can be generated (see sample event report).(PDF�K)
• The local program that sponsors the school sealant events can generate a report across all schools (see sample program report).(PDF�K)
• Companion software called SEALS_Admin amasses all of the data from the individual programs and produces statewide values of the summary and performance measures. It also ranks the individual programs on 15 critical summary/performance measures.

Helps justify programs

Oral health program managers can use SEALS data to measure the cost and impact of their sealant program. Documenting that sealant programs are a good use of state resources helps programs to get additional support that allows them to serve more children. Wisconsin, the first state to pilot-test SEALS, generated data that helped convince legislators to double state funding for the state抯 sealant programs (see generic one-page report drawn from actual data).(PDF�)

Helps increase efficiency

Oral health program managers can use SEALS data to rank school events by need and costs to allocate their scarce resources more efficiently. States can compare local sealant programs on costs, output, and efficiency. The software can also help them formulate goals, and assess less efficient programs. Both Wisconsin and Colorado have used SEALS data to allocate funding among local programs.

Package offers latest software, support

An updated version of SEALS is available free of charge as a package that includes

• Software.
• Child-level data collection form. (Word�K)
• Event-level data collection form. (Word�K)
• User抯 manual for SEALS. (PDF�7K)
• User抯 manual for SEALS_Admin. (PDF�4K)
• Technical notes for SEALS. (PDF�5K)
• Technical notes for SEALS_Admin. (PDF�6K)

Training and limited technical support for SEALS are now available, with priority given to states supported by the CDC Division of Oral Health Cooperative Agreement. For more information, please send inquiries to oralhealth@cdc.gov.

One or more documents on this Web page is available in Portable Document Format (PDF). You will need Acrobat Reader to view and print these documents.

One or more documents on this Web page are available in Microsoft� Word Format (DOC). You will need Word Viewer to view and print these documents.

Page last reviewed: October 29, 2008
Page last modified: December 4, 2007
Content source: Division of Oral Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion