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Updated: Aug 26, 2025
Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
Estimation of oral disease burden from claims and self-reported data
Christopher Okunseri1, Julie Frantsve-Hawley2, Madhuli Thakkar-Samtani2
1Department of Clinical Services, School of Dentistry, Marquette University Milwaukee Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
Objective:
To compare the use of Medicaid and commercial claims data with self-reported survey data in estimating the prevalence of oral disease burden.
Methods:
We analyzed 2018 Medicaid claims from the IBM Watson Medicaid Marketscan database, commercial claims from the IBM Dental Database, and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data. The estimate of oral disease burden was based on standard metrics using periodontal and caries-related Current Dental Terminology (CDT) procedure codes. A direct comparison between the data sets was also done.
Results:
Unweighted Medicaid and commercial enrollees were 11.6 and 10.5 million, respectively. The weighted proportion from MEPS for Medicaid and commercial plans ranged from 80 to 208 million people. Estimates of caries-related treatments were calculated from IBM Watson and MEPS data for Medicaid enrollees (13% vs. 12%, respectively) and commercial claims (25% vs. 17%, respectively). Prevalence of periodontal related treatments for those with a dental visit was estimated for IBM Watson and MEPS enrollees for Medicaid (0.7% vs. 0.5%, respectively) and commercial claims (7% vs. 1.6%, respectively). Dental disease estimates were higher in individuals with at least one dental visit across cohorts. Prevalence of disease for those with a dental visit based on specific procedures were higher in commercial plans than in Medicaid.
Conclusions:
Claims data has the potential to serve as a proxy measure for the estimate of dental disease burden in a population.
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