Dentistry is continuing to have a growing role in the healthcare space as awareness of the mouth-body connection increases.
While dentistry accounts for only a small portion of healthcare spending, investing more in the dental space could lead to a reduction in overall healthcare costs because of potential disease prevention.
Similar to other medical conditions, at-home dental care is crucial to preserving and improving oral health, which in turn leads to better overall health outcomes, experts have said.
Joel Berg, DDS, is the chief dental officer at Willo, a technology company, as well as a pediatric dentist. He recently connected with Becker’s to discuss some of the trends in the dental industry.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: Why is the mouth-body connection so important?
Dr. Joel Berg: We’ve known for 150 years about the mouth-body connection, we just haven’t had the technology and the science to prove it. In the last several years, with many discoveries and technology, and especially in biological, physiological science, we can see the very close link between the mouth and the body, and this applies to the gut microbiome.
We’re really a gigantic part of healthcare. We just have been sequestered in terms of the treatment aspect, which is primarily surgery. What I’m seeing is an evolution towards understanding dentistry as it is connected to the body, which means we’re part of this integrated system of health. What’s going to drive it further is going to be the business of dentistry. The idea of oral-systemic health is not new, but we’ve had two big trends. One is science and technology, and the other is this marketplace and the growth of consolidation.
Q: What is the financial impact of that connection?
JB: Dentistry is about 4% of healthcare costs and the approximate total dentistry expenditure — the gross domestic consumption of dentistry in the U.S. — is approximately $180 billion a year. Most of that is the result of dental caries. Even though dentistry is only 4% of healthcare spending, if you look at the most expensive diseases that affect humans, dental caries are connected with problems including heart disease, diabetes, pulmonary disorders and autoimmune disorders. So suddenly dentistry becomes interesting. When you talk about bringing the mouth into the body and you have caries and periodontal disease, those are both intersecting with these other health conditions.
Q: How will at-home dental care evolve?
JB: The whole dental team says “make sure you brush and floss.” But we don’t ever ask, can patients brush and floss? Are they doing it effectively? A colleague of mine has educated me, after all my years in the profession, that most healthcare education, whether it’s dentistry or medicine, takes place in clinics and hospitals, but most health improvement takes place at home. We say, come see us appropriately, make sure you brush and floss. But if they don’t do that effectively, their health is not going to improve just because they come to see us twice a year.
I think home care is going to get bigger and bigger every year. I call it chronic disease management. The future of dentistry is going to evolve into chronic disease management. The surgery is not going away, but we’re going to evolve into this differentiation that medicine has done a long time ago, which is medicine versus surgery.