Exploring Preventive Dental In An Employee Population

Self-insured employers and benefits advisers know all about mining health and prescription claims for insights. But are you looking beyond these data feeds? Here’s how one employer found trends in their dental data.

Dental benefits have gone from “nice to have” to a standard feature of most self-insured employers’ benefits plans. One Artemis Health customer wanted to know how their employees were using their dental benefits. Here’s how we helped.

Dental coverage helps attract and retain talented employees, and it’s also an important part of preventive health care. According to a WebMD survey, 90% of employers with 500 or more employees offer dental benefits.

The analysis.

The Artemis Platform is flexible enough to warehouse just about any benefits data feed, but it’s so much more than an old-school data warehouse. Artemis makes it easy for our customers to find trends, track engagement, and cross-walk data across different benefits programs.

For this customer, we used a number of pre-loaded filters to find trends around dental program utilization.

First, we sorted the number of claims by procedure code. We found that most dental claims were for preventive care visits.

The customer also wanted to explore the demographics around dental coverage utilization. We compared claim costs to employee type and used the Artemis Visualize app to create easy-to-read charts.

Additionally, this analysis included a count of anonymized dental claims by gender, office location, provider, job level, and even utilization bands. One interesting trend we found? Only 9% of eligible members had a preventive dental claim in the last year.

Finally, we helped the customer look at one more demographic breakdown: dental claims by age.

The de-identified data we used in this analysis showed a few key findings:

01   Most of this customer’s dental claims are for preventive care, which is a good sign. A recent SHRM study found that preventive dental care can positively impact a member’s health, including diabetes outcomes, cardiovascular health, and early diagnosis of other conditions. However, there’s room for many more members to take advantage of their dental benefits.

02   Full-time, hourly employees are driving the majority of the costs in this population.

03   Dental claims drop precipitously in this population after age 60, and younger members, including dependents, are the most likely to visit the dentist.

Dental claims are just one example of the types of feeds we work with at Artemis. We incorporate eligibility data, health and Rx claims, short-term and long-term disability, telemedicine, wellness, and much more. This gives our clients a holistic view of their benefits programming.

Taking action.

This analysis highlighted trends, utilization, and engagement data the employer needed to take action. They can use the insights gained to plan and execute benefits communications, encourage utilization, and even refine their dental program offerings to meet the needs of their member population.