P&R Dental Strategies, LLC (P&R), the premier dental insights company delivering customized, actionable business intelligence and claim review services to support a variety of dental industry stakeholders, has announced its co-authorship and contribution of de-identified, fee-for-service dental insurance claims data for a recently published study that investigates trends in claims from private dental practice in the United States during 2019 and 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study is titled: “Trends in dental insurance claims in the United States before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020,” by Gerardo Maupomé DDS, Juan F. Yepes DDS, et al. The study was published online by The Journal of Public Health Dentistry in January 2022 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jphd.12491).
The data for the study reviewed a 5% random sample of private dental insurance paid claims data between January 2019 and December 2020 from DentaBase®, P&R Dental Strategies’ massive dental data warehouse. Claims for 3.8 million patients constituted the 5% random sample for analyses. The data set was de-identified in compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines.
As a result of the partnership with P&R Dental Strategies, Dr. Gerardo Maupomé, Associate Dean of Research at Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health, Juan F. Yepes DDS, Professor in Pediatric Dentistry at the Indiana University School of Dentistry, and the study’s other authors, found that prior to the Spring 2020 shutdown an average of 1.8 million treatment courses took place per month. By April and May 2020 data showed only 175,000 and 867,000 treatment courses, respectively.
By June, treatment volume had returned to normal levels and maintained the trend through September before showing a slight drop-off again for October–December 2020. Other findings when comparing 2019 and 2020 data were related to growth in the urgent/emergency treatment category, impacts to total amount for billed and paid services, and more.
Dr. Maupomé commented, “This is the eighth published article resulting from the research data partnership between P&R Dental Strategies and Indiana University. P&R’s source of dental insurance claims data is very valuable for health services research applications. The size of P&R’s dataset affords the opportunity to investigate important aspects of dental practice. This is the first large-scale study in the United States depicting actual numeric variations in private dental insurance claims between the advent of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the lockdown in the Spring, and until December 2020, against claims filed throughout 2019. The results of this study should be of great interest to the entire dental industry.”
Paul T. Sheils, CEO of P&R Dental Strategies, said, “P&R Dental Strategies is proud to announce this latest journal publication from Dr. Maupomé, Dr. Yepes, and their colleagues at Indiana University. We’re proud that our multi-payer DentaBase claims database continues to be a resource for important research studies in dentistry. Our team of experts is very interested in examining trends relating to the pandemic-caused dental shutdown in Spring 2020 and thereafter.
We’re glad our data could contribute to this important study and we look forward to continuing to work with this esteemed group of researchers in the future. We expect findings like these will encourage continued discussions on this topic that impacted the entire dental industry.”
Tim Downey, Chief Analytics Officer of P&R Dental Strategies and co-author of the study, added, “To effectively conduct a study on such a scale required a large dataset like the one housed in DentaBase. The findings definitively show how, week-by-week, a large segment of dental practices experienced dramatic change during the pandemic — these results should be of interest to the whole dental industry. We look forward to continued collaboration with Dr. Maupomé, Dr. Yepes, and their team in the future.”
For more information on P&R Dental Strategies and our multi-payer database, DentaBase®, visit www.pandrdental.com.
For business inquiries, please contact P&R Dental Strategies Business Development at +1.856.986.6216 or email insights@PandRDental.com
About P&R Dental Strategies, LLC
P&R Dental Strategies is the premier dental insights company delivering customized, actionable business intelligence powered by DentaBase, our national multi-payer, fee-for-service claims database. P&R Dental Strategies’ flexible, cutting-edge technology platform provides an enterprise-level suite of quality measurement, business forecasting, claim review and utilization management, provider profiling, fraud and abuse prevention and network development solutions to customers seeking to contain costs and maximize efficiency across their businesses. P&R Dental Strategies customers can depend on the support of an industry-leading team of dentists, consultants, and statisticians to focus on their unique challenges.
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