With many employers looking for ways to manage risinghealth-related costs, disease management and wellness programs aregrowing in popularity. Disease management programs, while anaccepted medical practice, are still relatively new in the dentalfield. However, given the growing acceptance of the association oforal health to overall health, the importance of dental benefits toemployees, and the desire among employers to derive more value fromtheir benefit plans, dental disease management is a reasonable nextstep.

What exactly constitutes a comprehensive dental diseasemanagement program? According to MetLife, to deliver the most valueto employers and employees, dental disease management programsshould contain these components, working in conjunction:employee engagement, disease risk and severityscoring, targeted relevant education,analysis/reporting, and continuous looping engagement andreporting over time. It also needs to be easy for employers toimplement and employees to participate to be effective. MetLife'sdisease management solution, the MetLife Dental HealthManager^SM, is offered to group customers with 500 ormore employees at little or no additional cost¹.

Dr. David Guarrera, DDS, vice president, MetLife Dental ProductManagement, says, "Effective dental disease management programshave the potential to benefit both employees and employers withhealthier outcomes and cost mitigation. A robust education platformcombined with the systems and processes needed to measure andmonitor the health of employees and their utilization of benefitsover time can help influence healthier behavior."

Components of an Effective Dental Disease ManagementProgram

An effective dental disease management program should besupported by a dental plan design that appropriately providescoverage for dental services that prevent as well as treat dentaldisease. The program should also be flexible enough to coordinatewith an employer's current medical disease management or otherwellness programs, or perform as a stand-alone solution. The othercomponents include:

1) Employee Engagement. The employeeengagement component should be designed to help employers andemployees get the most value out of the program by drivingparticipation and ongoing, sustainable involvement. It is thecomponent that helps employees identify and learn about theirdental health and risk over time. Ongoing communications areimportant and should be targeted to program participants, deliveredat least once a year, and/or at a time when employees' risk leveland/or disease level may have changed.

2) Disease Risk & SeverityScoring. Scoring helps employees measure, understandand track their risk and severity of disease. This enables them tosee how their risk for and their severity of dental disease changesover time and how their actions, or lack of action, affect theirscores. For scoring, dental disease management programs can useself-reported health data, claims utilization data, and ifavailable, data from medical disease management vendors.

3) Targeted Relevant Education.Education should serve as the foundation of a dental diseasemanagement program. It should be robust enough to stand on its ownfor employees who want to learn about oral health by themselves,and more importantly, support the later components that pushrelevant education to employees based on their oral health and riskfor dental disease. The education component should containreliable, timely information and should address the associationsbetween oral health and overall health. It should beeasy-to-navigate and contain interactive tools like riskassessments.

After being presented with their scores for risk and severity ofdisease, the dental disease management program should provideemployees with prompt actionable information, such as:

• Links to articles and resources relevant to their specific oralhealth needs;
• A summary of health concerns they should take note of; and
• A recommended action plan that employees can follow to helpimprove their oral health.

4)Analysis/Reporting. Aggregate-levelanalysis and reporting provides employers with valuable insightsthat can illustrate how benefit plans and disease managementprograms are functioning, and can help employers better understandthe health of their employee populations. A dental diseasemanagement program can report on participation, risks, healthconditions, change in health risk, claim costs, and dental claimutilization analytics.

5) Continuous Looping Engagement and Reporting OverTime. Employers can gain ahistorical perspective on how employees within the program areusing their dental benefits, the degree of employee engagement inthe program and changes in the dental health of the population. Ifengaged, medical disease management vendors may be provided withhistorical employee-specific information.

"After employers have a better understanding of the health oftheir employee population and how existing benefits are used, theycan more effectively consider making dental plan design changes,"adds Dr. Guarrera.

To help employers and brokers understand more about dentaldisease management programs, MetLife has available a free guide,Dental Disease Management: What Makes an Effective Program- click here to download.

¹ If a medical disease management vendor is engaged,a setup fee may apply for the transfer of data files.