Dentists connected to the ADA Dental Experience and Research Exchange™ (DERE) through Open Dental now have even more ways to gain insights into their practices. With the release of two new DERE reports, including its first financial report, participants can access more easy-to-understand data about their practices’ performance.
Better understand your practice and patient care with DERE
The ADA launched DERE in 2021 as an outcomes assessment, research, and reporting program intended to promote excellence in dental care. Users of the free program can view reports on their practice and patient data that can help them make evidence-based clinical decisions to improve patient health outcomes.
With DERE, “Open Dental users are able to gain insight to become better clinicians,” said Open Dental CEO Nathan Sparks. “Dentists can see up-to-date snapshots of patient and practice data to see treatment trends and also view this data by location, provider or patient demographic. This allows them to provide more focused, evidence-based care. With the new reports, dentists can also focus on average patient cost of care.”
New reports offer additional ways to identify trends at your practice
Dentists can now leverage two new reports to help analyze their practices’ performance.
You can find aggregated average per-patient charges (i.e., billed amounts) within your practice using DERE’s Total Cost of Care report. This report is the first financial report offered to DERE participants. In addition to taking an aggregate look at per-patient charges, you can also take a closer look by filtering by practice location or clinician. Open Dental users must be running software version 21.1 or higher to access this report.
Participants can also find a new report within the dashboard’s Population Profile reporting category.
What percentage of your active established patients only received an oral evaluation, preventive services, or radiographs during the measurement year? Easily identify these trends in follow-up care with the Established Patients with only Preventive Care at Follow-up report. You may also choose to filter this report by practice location or clinician.
Like most DERE reports, both the Total Cost of Care and Established Patients with only Preventive Care at Follow-up reports can be stratified by a variety of variables such as age, gender, and geography. You can find more information about these and all other DERE reports here.
Improved public oral health outcomes start at the dental practice
Being able to easily see trends in practice and clinician performance is advantageous for those who wish to find ways to improve their care and business. However, this internal insight is only the beginning of DERE’s capabilities.
As Open Dental user and DERE participant Kevin Dens, D.D.S. explains, adoption of the program has the power to lead to positive changes in the oral health of the public at large. That’s because the aggregate data collected in DERE can help to support the development of quality measures, evidence-based guidelines, healthcare policies, and clinical decision support tools.
“With DERE, dentists can come together to help create a comprehensive dental data database,” explained Dr. Dens. “And because DERE data isn’t tied to a single payer, it’s inclusive of all dental patients — both insured and uninsured.” As a result, this can allow future policy and clinical decision-making tools to be designed based on a more comprehensive data set.
Dr. Dens says he’s found it valuable to be able to easily see current trends among his patients. However, most exciting to him is that “as more dentists join DERE, the better our picture of the state of oral health in the U.S. will be. DERE will be one of the most influential programs to help dentists and the profession for decades to come.”
Interested in joining DERE? Learn more and enroll at ADA.org/DERE.