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Caitlin Walsdorf, a partner at HealthScape Advisors, a Chartis company, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about a new survey-based report that explores value-based care (VBC) implementation in dentistry. The survey was a collaboration between HealthScape, the CareQuest Institute of Oral Health and the National Association of Dental Plans.
Walsdorf co-leads HealthScape’s Ancillary Center of Excellence focusing on areas such as dental, vision, and hearing. She is also an active member of the Medicare and Transaction Advisory Centers of Excellence
Healthcare Innovation: We write a lot about value-based care in the medical space, especially in primary care, but we haven’t written about it much in the dental space. Is value-based care in dentistry in its very early stages?
Walsdorf: Typically, when people hear value-based care in the context of dental, they think about the Medicaid market, where it might be a capitated payment made to providers for members that are assigned to that provider in a dental home model, similar to how you think about a medical home model on the medical side. But not as many people think about dental value-based care in the context of the commercial markets.
Commercial dental is typically associated with fee-for-service payments and large, broad networks. That said, I think value-based care is much broader than capitated payments. There are value-based incentives that could work in the commercial line of business that both payers and providers find favorable, at least according to our survey results. These could be things like member steerage opportunities, so things like preferred provider locator placement or a quality designator on a locator. Also, quality bonus payments are incentives that both payers and providers ranked pretty favorably in the survey.