06 August 2024

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Teledentistry a benefit for special needs, long-term care patients

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People with special health care needs in long-term care settings may have difficulty accessing oral health care in a traditional dental setting. Researchers at UNC Adams School of Dentistry recently found that teledentistry could offer new avenues for treatments and diagnostics and could improve overall access to care.

Working with Access Dental Care, a nonprofit that provides mobile dental services to people with special health care needs and long-term care residents, and funded by the CareQuest Institute, ASOD researchers, led by alumna Karthika Kandala, DDS, along with Jane Weintraub, DDS, MPH, the R. Gary Rozier and Chester W. Douglass Distinguished Professor, Di Wu, PhD, and ASOD student Hannah Archer, DDS ‘25, looked at treatment decisions made in-person and through teledentistry in these types of patients. The study’s results were recently published in the Journal of the American Dental Association.

Researchers saw that concordance was substantial for surgery and removable denture treatment decisions and moderate for restorative needs. Weintraub said it was exciting for the researchers to see the alignment in treatment decisions between those seeing patients in-person and those seeing them via teledentistry.

“[This means] dental professional teams, working on and off-site, can work well together to deliver expedient, more accessible, dental care,” Weintraub said.

And patients can reap the benefits of the research, as well, since the findings support combining teledentistry and mobile dentistry to reach those patients that may not have access to a traditional dental office or who are in long-term care facilities.

“Patients with special health care needs are so often left out of research. This study shows that teledentistry is a viable option and can affect the efficiency in how we plan medically necessary dental care to this vulnerable population,” said a statement from the research team.

Looking ahead, the researchers plan to disseminate the results more widely and push for the use of technology and teamwork to improve patient care, and their nonprofit partner is already moving ahead with lessons learned from the study.

According to a statement from Access Dental Care, the organization has already implemented the practice of hygienists seeing patients for an assessment, photos and X-rays so the dentist can plan care based on the same diagnostic tools they have available in-person.

Source: https://dentistry.unc.edu/