A U.S.-based oral health nonprofit is seeking to bridge the long-standing divide between medical and dental data using artificial intelligence.
CareQuest Institute for Oral Health®, a national nonprofit focused on advancing a more accessible and integrated oral health system, announced Tuesday it has partnered with health-care AI company Innovaccer to integrate medical and dental claims and clinical data.
Despite growing evidence linking oral health to conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and adverse pregnancy outcomes, medical and dental data systems remain largely siloed, limiting visibility into the full patient journey.
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In a news release, the organizations said the collaboration will link data through Innovaccer’s Humbi platform, with the goal of helping providers, payers and policymakers better understand how oral health affects overall health outcomes and total cost of care.
“Oral health is an essential part of overall health, yet our systems and data have long treated it as separate,” said Wade Rakes, chief executive officer of CareQuest Institute. “By partnering with Innovaccer to integrate medical and dental data, we’re working to better understand patient journeys across the health system.”
The partners say the initiative aims to create a more complete, longitudinal view of patient health and support improved care coordination.
Previous efforts to combine data
Medical and dental data integration efforts are not new.
A 2017 study published in BMJ Open described how researchers expanded the Rochester Epidemiology Project in Minnesota to link electronic dental records from eight community practices with medical records for 31,750 residents of Olmsted County.
That infrastructure allowed dental procedures to be studied alongside hospitalizations, diagnoses and prescriptions. In a proof-of-concept analysis, researchers found antibiotic prescribing before dental procedures declined from 62 per cent to 7 per cent after the 2007 American Heart Association guideline changes on infective endocarditis prophylaxis.
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The 2017 study noted that fragmented data systems have historically limited large-scale research on oral-systemic health connections.
Earlier efforts to consolidate oral health data include the Consortium for Oral Health Research and Informatics (COHRI), launched in 2007 by more than 30 U.S. dental schools to share electronic oral health data for research and education. Six COHRI institutions later developed the BigMouth Dental Data Repository, a multi-institutional database of partially de-identified electronic dental records.
The CareQuest–Innovaccer partnership builds on those foundations but seeks to integrate dental data directly with broader medical datasets to generate system-wide insights.
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