Henderson, Nev.-based PDS Health has become a leader in medical-dental integration, and now they’re turning their attention to the next areas of focus to further their progress.
The organization became the first DSO to integrate medical and dental care with the Epic EHR system in 2022. Since then, they’ve partnered with other organizations to expand the use of the program and bring awareness to the link between oral health and overall healthcare to patients and providers alike. It also launched PDS Health Technologies to provide technology support to external organizations, including several dental schools.
PDS Health most recently partnered with the University of the Pacific to implement Epic across the school’s healthcare system. The University of the Pacific will become the first dental school in the U.S. to implement PDS Health’s dental-optimized instance of Epic across medical, dental and ambulatory surgery center settings. This collaboration will include the addition of Epic at the Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry in San Francisco.
Preston Raulerson, president of PDS Health Technologies, recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss the progress that has been made in integrating dental and medical care, and what the company will be focused on next in this area.
Note: This response was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What do you think of the overall progress that’s been made within healthcare to integrate medical and dental over the last few years?
Preston Raulerson: We’re always tough critics. I think our eyes are always forward thinking about what else we could do and how quickly we want to accelerate, but I think there are great strides that have been made. Recently, at the federal level, we’ve had a greater focus on the overlaps between oral health and overall health, and trying to code that into regulation [and] into reimbursements is really helpful. We’ve also seen really good partnerships with some of our payer partners, both on the dental payer side and the medical payer side, where they’re recognizing the benefits too.
From a research perspective, there’s so much more we are still studying, and we learn something every week about the impact between oral healthcare and overall health … There’s always going to be the next tranche of research that comes out that points to specific overlaps, but it feels like we’ve kind of eclipsed the point that we have to prove there’s a linkage between oral healthcare and overall patient wellbeing and medical healthcare. We passed that. Now, it’s just getting into the specifics of, “Okay, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to lean in and take advantage of that?” For us, I think we are in this world now where making sure our dental providers are equipped with the tools, equipped with the understanding, and that they are appropriately compensated in some way, shape or form — that’s the focus for us. We know dental providers are the most common point of preventive care for any American by a factor of like three to one. This opportunity we’re in to help elevate what patients understand about their overall health is really natural.
The incentive structures — it feels like that’s the only thing left for us to change now that we’ve solved for a lot of the technical hurdles and a lot of the clinical training [and] clinical understanding hurdles, so that’s what we’re working on. That’s what we think the next tranche is going to be. We already have data that makes it comfortable for us to say that a patient who is seen by a dental provider who is focused on dental-medical integration is a healthier patient with lower medical costs and better outcomes than a patient who is not seen by an oral healthcare provider who invests the time, energy and focus in dental-medical integration. We’ve crossed that bridge. It’s a fact. Data backs it up. Everybody knows it, and we are happy in our position in this industry of being leaders in this space. We also view this as an opportunity for us to bring more people along, and that’s part of why we have this initiative with dental schools and other DSOs to help make this platform something they can use, because at the very least, we need to solve for the technology gaps that exist with the other dental PMS platforms that are out there.
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