Maxine Feinberg
Immediate President American Dental Association, USA
Title: Improving overall health through interprofessional collaboration: A new age
Biography
Biography: Maxine Feinberg
Abstract
The goal of interprofessional learning is to prepare all health professionals to deliberatively work together with the common goal of building a better patient centered US health care system. Dentists today are able to contribute in many ways to improving patients’ overall health outcomes by treating their dental disease and restoring and maintaining their oral health. Today’s health professions mandate interprofessional education and collaboration as part of their core curricula; ensuring that today’s graduates will be comfortable having the necessary dialogue to insure optimum patient care. For those of us who are in practice; we can take advantage of a new environment in healthcare brought about in large part by solid data on the connection between dental health and overall health and changes in reimbursement models in medicine. According to the CDC, 29.1 million Americans have diabetes mellitus. 27.8% or 8.1 million of them are undiagnosed. 176 billion dollars of direct medical costs can be directly attributed to diabetes, that’s one in five health care dollars. 27 million people visit a dentist every year that don’t see a physician. Think of the number of patients that could be screened for prediabetes diabetes and hypertension. The estimated medical cost savings of this type collaboration could be close to 150 million dollars. 19.4 million patients with insurance visit a physician each year and don’t see a dentist. That’s about 50 dentists per practicing dentist in this country. Imagine what we could do to improve the overall health if we started to communicate with our colleagues in medicine, podiatry, pharmacy. On average Type 2 diabetics with untreated disease pay $7,056 compared to those who are treated who pay $4,216. A recent study showed that those diabetics that received periodontal care early in their diagnosis, before initiating medication saved $1,799. Researchers at Columbia University have shown that the number of missing teeth and the percentage of deep periodontal pockets can be an accurate indicator of prediabetes in 3 out of 4 cases. In the past, we were armed with nothing more than anecdotal information and were not seriously taken by our physician colleagues. Today we have solid data and the landscape for reimbursement is charged by accountable care organizations, outcomes based payments have created new opportunities collaboration that would ultimately improve our patients’ overall health and potentially could save millions of dollars in health care dollars.