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Customer Case Study

How The TeleDentists is saving payors and hospitals $13.2 million 

The TeleDentists’ on-demand dentist solution is improving healthcare– whether it’s helping members avoid unnecessary emergency room visits and saving payers like Anthem and Aetna Dental of up to $13.2 million annually or allowing a large home health agency to meet regulatory requirements with a 7 day go-live. 

Use Cases — Home Healthcare, Emergency Diversion, Specialist Consults 

Background

The TeleDentists is the first-to-market virtual dentistry solution, providing 24/7/365 on-demand licensed dentists for urgent oral and dental needs. Utilizing VSee’s comprehensive, flexible platform, The TeleDentists is able to simply and quickly set up and deliver multiple different care models according to its clients’ needs. This may mean direct-to-consumer care delivery or ER diversion and sepsis monitoring for payers and health systems or oral screening and support for home health agencies, senior assisted living and skilled nursing facilities.

Use Case #1: Home Health Visits

Problem

Regulations required a large New York home healthcare agency to include oral health screenings and follow-ups in order to be compliant for its program. 

Solution

Using VSee’s platform, The TeleDentists were able to quickly create a customized waiting room tailored to deliver this program. The custom link allowed the agency’s healthcare workers to easily connect with a teledentist during their assigned patient visit rounds and efficiently provide the required oral screenings.

“With VSee, we were able to quickly set up a virtual care instance that allowed us to deliver our customized program in a timely manner so our client could comply with New York’s home healthcare regulations. This made for simple, fast onboarding and the care-givers were able to assist patients as old as 98 for virtual teledental consultations.” 
Leah Sigler, RDH
President of The TeleDentists

Outcomes

> 1000

PATIENTS

Served in 1st Year

< 2

MINUTES

Patient Wait Time

98%

Patient Satisfaction

< 7

DAYS

Go Live

Featured Benefits

  • Customized, branded waiting room and intake form
  • Simple, fast care-giver training and onboarding
  • Guest login on VSee platform – no account creation necessary 
  • Immediate access to a dentist when care-givers are onsite with patient
  • Documented referrals for office visits and ongoing care if necessary
  • Regular customizable reports securely sent directly to the corporate office
  • Claims filing for payment of services rendered

Use Case #2: ER Diversion (Direct-to-consumer)

Problem

According to the Health Policy Institute, someone is in the ER with a dental complaint every 15 seconds. These ER visits cost an average of $1200 per visit and about $2.8 billion annually and have a typical patient wait time of 4 hours. 

Solution

Over the past three years, The TeleDentists has partnered with multiple payors and telehealth providers such as Sesame Health, Anthem and Aetna Dental, providing accessible on-demand oral health care to their members. Through its services, The TeleDentists have provided virtual dentistry consultations to thousands of patients nationwide, effectively diverting many unnecessary emergency room visits and saving these companies millions of healthcare dollars on dental codes in the ER*. 

Outcomes

84%

ER Visits Avoided

95%

NPS

$1.25M

Saved per Month
* average number of dental-related visits to the ER per month = 1300
84% ER avoidance = 1092 visits diverted from ER

Featured Benefits

  • On-demand dentist any time a patient has need
  • Simple, fast implementation including patient onboarding
  • Decreased readmits through referral recommendations for follow-on care 
  • Customizable, branded waiting room and intake form via VSee platform
  • Customized reports sent directly to administrators
  • Compliance with regulatory requirements in all 50 states

Use Case #3: Specialist Consults for ER and Health Systems

Problem

For Integrated Medical-Dental Care
A recent Becker’s article reported that several health systems such as Northwell have begun integrating dental services into their hospitals in an effort to streamline and provide more holistic care to patients. Executives are becoming more aware of the connection between oral health and overall well-being. The need for almost every service in the hospital needs a dental medicine team (e.g. organ transplant, cardiac valve replacement). The challenge has been how to get started.

For Streamlined Emergency Departments
Research shows 95% of dental-related visits are not medical emergencies, where no treatment is rendered and no follow-on care is set up. Up to 40% of adult visits are paid by Medicaid and 69% of children’s visits are paid by Medicaid. Moreover, Medicaid has been the primary payer for non-emergency dental visits in the ED since 2014.

Solution

The TeleDentists provide an affordable and scalable way to quickly add in on-demand oral health experts. Leveraging VSee’s secure, HIPAA-compliant platform it offers easy implementation on computers, tablets, and or smart devices. This allows health systems to improve care by breaking the silos between dental and medical care, including 24/7/365 dentist consults to divert unnecessary Emergency Room Visits and to provide more efficient care when diversion is not possible.

Outcomes

  • Streamline ER process for dental-related level 1 emergencies*
  • Lower readmissions by triaging patients to a dental clinic or back to The TeleDentists if care is not currently possible
  • Improve care outcomes with preventative oral health care
  • Optimize staff and physician resources
The TeleDentists makes it easy to add preventative oral health to any health system. Having an oral health expert on the team allows staff and doctors to work at the top of their license by diverting dental patients to the right specialists and getting patients to the right care. A virtual dentist saves staff time, money and delays in patient care.”
Maria Kundstadter
CEO of The Teledentists
Learn more about The TeleDentists here or contact [email protected]