Oral Medical Care Coordination- Pillar 4

The last research brief for our Oral Medical Care Coordination in the U.S. series is out! As a reminder, our first three research briefs in the series covered Awareness (increasing recognition, knowledge, and understanding), Workforce Development and Operations (highlighting interprofessional education), and Information Exchange (integrating electronic health record systems.) Our final research brief focuses on the next of the four pillars we proposed – Payment.

The Payment pillar focuses on the importance of supporting financial incentives to support oral medical care coordination. Existing payment structures predominantly operate within a fee-for-service model, which generally separates oral health and medical care. Fee-for-service models limit providers and present them with difficult-to-navigate reimbursement policies for medical and oral health services, which often deter providers from adopting coordinated care approaches.

Aligning financial incentives with patient outcomes may offer a viable solution to these financial barriers, promoting more widespread adoption of coordinated care practices by shifting the focus from volume to value. These value-based care models focus on improving patient outcomes and quality of care rather than paying providers based on the number of services they deliver. Value-based care models may incentivize providers to deliver high-quality, coordinated care that addresses both medical and oral health issues. Creating financial incentives for coordinated care that makes billing for services easier may be systematically challenging but is likely to be one of the biggest motivators for more comprehensive, patient-centered care.

Read this brief, and the rest of the briefs from this series here: https://www.kdhrc.com/news-publications/