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Keywords

oral health access disparities, Medicaid in dentistry

Abstract

Disparities in access to dental care for those whose primary/only dental insurance is Medicaid is a known issue. The infamous case of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver from Maryland brought this great need for access to private dental care through Medicaid to the fore. Yet, to this date, there has been no resource to address this great need.

Dentists accepting Medicaid fall into two categories: those who practice in federally qualified health centers (FQHC), and those who practice privately. FQHCs are known anecdotally to have long waitlists, delaying access to needed care (as in the case of Driver). This is compounded by the inability to identify private dentists who will accept Medicaid. To solve this problem in New York State, we made an interactive map where users of the My Healthy Smiles Mobile Application, created by the New York State Dental Foundation, will be able to find private dentists accepting Medicaid in their locale.

Using two publicly available datasets, we generated a new database of private dentists accepting Medicaid in New York State using R, a software environment for statistical computing and analysis. We also analyzed the rate of private dentists/100,000 of the county population to rank the counties with the highest need. This resource has been useful from its generation to help connect patients with providers and to help lobbyists communicate the need that exists to politicians and policymakers interested in improving oral health disparities in New York State.

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