Delta Dental of California and affiliates are taking action this year to further integrate healthcare and spread awareness of the link between oral health and overall well-being.
Delta Dental of California and affiliates CEO Sarah Chavarria and Chief Dental Officer Daniel Croley, DMD, recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss how the organization is supporting medical-dental integration efforts within its network.
Editor’s note: These responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Why has medical-dental integration become a priority for Delta Dental?
Sarah Chavarria: We’ve been in business for 70 years this year, and we take care of 31 million Americans, so we have a lot of really great insights to draw around oral health. For the last few years, Delta Dental has really been positioning itself to lead this transformation toward “oral health is health.” One of the things getting in the way is that most Americans think about their trip to the dentist as, “I’m going to get a cleaning,” or “I’m going to go get a filling done.” What they’re not thinking about is, this is a preventive care touch point. Typically, [patients] go twice a year, so that opportunity to engage with a healthcare provider and identify the state of their health, that’s so important, not only for our 31 million Americans, but for all Americans. So, we’re really excited that through some of our work and others’ work, that this conversation is happening.
Dr. Daniel Croley: I think many people suspect that their mouth diseases and health are connected to their overall health, but I don’t think the message has resonated yet culturally. This is a unique opportunity for us as an organization to take that message out into the marketplace in a really meaningful, actionable way.
Q: What strategies does the organization have in place to advance medical-dental integration?
SC: As you can imagine, we’re doing many things. We are telling the story in such a way that Americans learn, so creating awareness. One example of that is we’ve done a lot of surveys and research around women’s health as an example, and what oral health looks like for a woman entering perimenopause or menopause. Creating that awareness for women that there are things that are going to happen in your mouth that you want to make sure you’re going and getting checked out is a great example of how we’re creating awareness for a population. Now, let’s flip to older Americans. We know that older Americans will outnumber young people within the decade, and that is a strategic priority for us. Through our relationship with AARP [and] doing interviews with organizations that have older Americans as their audience, we shared similar data about what happens in our mouth when we are aging, and what we should be looking for.
We’ve also invested a lot of our time and energy and resources to find ways to connect with providers and build those communication channels. We have a provider advisory council of about 350 providers who are from within our network. We brought a group of them together just a few weeks ago to talk through the ways we can support providers in creating awareness for patients, opening up access to care, and find ways not only to enable them to deliver care, which is what they want to do, but also put in their hands all of the great insights that, as a 70-year-old company, we have around the health of our population from an oral health perspective.
The last thing is [our] incredible partnerships across the healthcare space with organizations like Epic to think through [ways] we can help connect the dental record to the medical health record, and our relationship with folks like the American Heart Association.
DC: Twenty-seven million Americans actually go see a dentist every year and do not see a physician in that same year. Most of these visits are a preventive visit, and we saw an opportunity to expand that preventive visit with very tangible outcomes related to cardiovascular health. I love working directly with an organization like the American Heart Association because they’re so focused on patient health and well-being, and that aligns so well with our mission of access to quality healthcare. The product of that collaboration is actually an initiative called Healthy Smiles, Healthy Hearts, which is focused on the heart health screening and the potential early intervention of cardiovascular problems at that dental visit. We can leverage that concept of going to the dentist for prevention beyond just going for that cleaning and exam into other kinds of preventive conversations, and the end result is earlier detection of cardiovascular issues, reducing the risk of very significant negative health consequences for that individual that likely would create bigger life impacts.
[Epic is] the largest electronic health record system in the country … If we’re actually connecting oral health and oral diseases to systemic health and systemic diseases, we need to make sure physicians and dentists are talking to each other, and that needs to happen in a really easy way. This collaboration with Epic helps us to make that connection between the physician and the dentist easier. The outcome of all of this collaboration is really a focus on improving health and well-being, specifically for those 27 million people who are going to a dental visit every year as their only healthcare access point.
Q: Why is it critical for payers to participate in this integration of care?
DC: Our identity is built on our understanding of us as a health plan. We are very connected with providers. It is through that partnership that healthcare is actually delivered. We sit in the center of an ecosystem of care delivery, so we help providers see the things they may not actually see within their own scope of practice because they’re focused on that delivery of care. As the entire ecosystem around healthcare has recognized, this is a very complicated multi-factorial equation of getting people to health. It involves education. It involves funding. It involves care delivery. It involves referrals to different types of care deliverers. So, our collaboration with other stakeholders helps us bring providers into that understanding of how they appropriately contribute to the overall health of the patients who are sitting in their chair.
We think of going to the dentist for a filling, for cleanings, for the exams and X-rays, things like that. What most patients don’t actually connect is that dentists are actually reviewing multiple systems of the body because the mouth is a reflection of the overall health of the body. We want to take that and expand that, and Delta Dental is in a unique position to take that message more broadly across the entire ecosystem.
