Study: Dental care vouchers reduce emergency department visits for uninsured

HealthPartners aims to reduce return emergency room visits, treatment costs

Saint Paul, Minn. – Dec. 2, 2015 – Initial results of a HealthPartners study indicate that a voucher program can reduce the use of emergency room visits by patients seeking non-urgent dental care while increasing awareness and accessibility of care options.

Access to appropriate dental care can be challenging for patients without insurance or those covered by Medicaid. They often go to hospital emergency rooms for treatment that could be more appropriately delivered in a clinic. The year-long study by the HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research looks at the difference a voucher can have in reducing treatment costs and improving patient dental health.

For the study, Regions Hospital clinicians identified patients who visited the emergency room for non-urgent dental complaints who were also covered by Medicaid or did not have insurance at all. They provided these patients with a voucher for dental care at the HealthPartners Midway Dental Clinic. Researchers then measured the volume of repeat emergency room visits of those who received the voucher as opposed to those who did not at 30-day and 90-day intervals.

“If patients come into our emergency room with a dental complaint, we can help comfort their pain, but we can’t fix the underlying problem – they really need to see a dentist for appropriate care,” says Kurt Isenberger, MD, a HealthPartners physician and medical director of emergency services at Regions Hospital. “Over the long-term, we have seen patients continuously return to the point where their tooth dies, they get an infection and they end up in the hospital. Our clinical researchers recognized the importance of this type of study and did a great job of designing it to find practical, scalable solutions.”

Of the randomized group of 79 patients who received vouchers, 34 redeemed them. Only four patients returned to the emergency room within 30 days and only six returned within 90 days of the initial visit. In comparison, 17 patients from the non-voucher group revisited the emergency within 30 days and 20 revisited within 90 days.

Isenberger says that the average cost for an emergency room dental visit without insurance is around $1,000. In addition to finding ways to reduce cost and better utilize resources, he says the main goal of the study is to get people to the right place for care.

“While we are able to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits, we’re very excited to be able to offer a better experience for patients that ultimately allows us to solve the problem, as opposed to simply minimizing pain,” he says. “The fact that HealthPartners is a critical access dental provider as part of our integrated care system has allowed this study to be successful and we believe it demonstrates tremendous potential moving forward.”

The randomized study will continue through January, at which point researchers will begin additional analysis.