Delta Dental and CORHIO Partner to Identify Opportunities to Improve Oral Health

Nonprofit dental insurer joins forces with health information exchange to analyze emergency room data to find intervention opportunities for oral health issues.

A serendipitous encounter at the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation (HTI) campus leads to a project between two neighboring companies that will provide opportunities to improve Colorado’s oral health.

Delta Dental of Colorado and CORHIO are both tenants of the healthcare industry integrator space in Denver’s River North district. An informal meeting in the fall of 2018 turned into a full-fledged plan to tackle one of the more persistent problems in oral health care: people getting oral health care in emergency room settings when they should be getting regular preventive care in a dental setting. By using CORHIO’s data services and health information exchange technology to analyze clinical and claims data for a certain segment of Delta Dental’s membership, the partners are attempting to identify opportunities to identify proactive care to:

• Improve the patient experience
• Improve population health
• Reduce the cost of health care

There is a history of isolating the financing and delivery of oral health care from the medical health care sector, yet evidence suggests that improved oral health lowers overall health care costs and outcomes. By joining medical clinical data with dental claims data, the two companies can determine how to intervene more effectively with appropriate care delivery in the future.

“This is exactly the kind of collaboration I had hoped would be happening by putting all of these innovative companies in the same space,” said health-tech entrepreneur and Catalyst president Mike Biselli. “This ecosystem is built to foster these types of interactions that might not happen elsewhere. It can lead to some really progressive partnerships that help increase our understanding of how we can better deliver health care.”

Delta Dental and CORHIO will incorporate the findings into a mutually developed white paper that they plan to share publicly.

“We are committed to elevating the importance of oral health in the minds of health professionals and the broader public and to advancing innovations that help us improve the health of the communities we serve,” said Helen Drexler, President and CEO of Delta Dental of Colorado. “This collaboration with CORHIO within the Catalyst community will allow us to advance both of these important goals.”

“This ground-breaking project with Delta Dental is the culmination of years of hard work by so many healthcare organizations in Colorado who are dedicated to building robust health information exchange,” said Morgan Honea, CEO of CORHIO. “Through this collaboration, we’re incredibly excited to work together for greater integration between physical and oral healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes and experiences. We are thrilled that the idea for this exciting project transpired at Catalyst HTI, a community of innovators we are proud to be a part of.”