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Dental Care Is The Missing Piece Of Population Health Management

Dental Care Is The Missing Piece Of Population Health Management
by Jennifer Bresnick

Dental care often falls by the wayside for high-risk patients, but better integration with existing population health management programs could improve outcomes.

The care continuum may be drawing closer together as value-based care creates new business cases for population health management, yet one segment of the healthcare delivery system has been chronically left out of the loop.

Though they provide critical preventive services that have wide-ranging impacts on clinical health, dental care providers are still relegated to the fringes of the patient-centered ecosystem.

On the consumer side, dentists have been fighting a bad rap for decades. Separate insurance protocols, which often require significant out-of-pocket expenses, along with inadequate patient education and negative perceptions about treatment options and the potential for discomfort, have contributed to cultural stereotypes of the dentist’s office as a place to fear, dread, and avoid.

Within the provider community, low participation in meaningful use, different record-keeping needs, and a unique set of health IT vendors have kept dentists technologically separate from the rest of the clinical spectrum, while limited collaboration and coordination with primary care providers has largely left dental health off the checklist for patient-centered preventive care.

But dodging or delaying dental care can have significant impacts on overall patient wellness, and may lead to more expensive, invasive, and painful procedures down the line. Dentists can act as the first line of defense for the prevention and detection of oral cancers, gum disease that results in bone loss, and difficult-to-treat infections that start in the teeth and jaws.

Read full article on Health IT Analytics.