How do dental patients feel about having secure online access to their oral health information through patient portals? Do they want the ability to share their dental information with their medical providers and potentially access education and appointment information?  

Care coordination between dentistry and other health disciplines is essential to making sure that providers get the right information at the right time to deliver the best care possible to patients. But getting that coordination right is complex and challenging. It involves communication and information exchange by providers, payors, patients, and systems to help guide the delivery of safe. What’s more, dentistry is still fairly new to electronic health records and is playing catch up and integrate into the medical system.

State-Based Strategies for Dental Data Exchange and Care Coordination

Care coordination is essential to providing patients with the best possible care — the right care, at the right time, in the right place. Ensuring that all providers caring for a given patient have access to the same information and can communicate seamlessly with one another is vital to transforming the health system.

What is interoperability? It’s an umbrella term for ensuring that different systems and software applications are able to communicate and understand shared data. This video explains the different layers of interoperability and the overall goal, which is to best serve patients at the point of care.

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What are the challenges to care coordination? In this video, Sean Boynes, DMD, MS, vice president of health improvement at CareQuest Institute, explains how coordination can be daunting because it requires bridging silos and exposing a portion of your operation to someone else. Providers may hesitate to be open and honest about the weaknesses in their practices. But there are opportunities, too. True care coordination will require a significant cultural change and recognizing the deep connections between oral disease and overall systemic health.

As part of the Dental Data Exchange Project, CareQuest Institute for Oral Health helped develop the first implementation guides to bridge the communication gap between primary care and oral health care. National partners and thought leaders, including representatives from the Department of Defense, the American Dental Association (ADA), and the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) Program Office, collaborated on the guides, which include critical information for electronic dental health information (EHI) coordination.