Henderson, Nev.-based PDS Health is continuing to advance medical-dental integration within the healthcare industry through its newest business, PDS Health Technologies.
The DSO launched the business earlier this month, enabling it to provide EHR capabilities to external organizations and providers through Epic Community Connect. PDS Health Technologies also offers revenue cycle management, consulting services and staffing and operational support.
Preston Raulerson was appointed president of the business. He recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss the new business and how it will impact the dental and medical fields.
Editor’s note: Responses are lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What inspired the launch of PDS Health Technologies?
Preston Raulerson: It was really driven around the fact that we have made large investments in our technology platforms. While they were doing a lot of great work internally within PDS Health, the rate of change that we wanted to see in the market meant that we really needed to take those investments and not capture them only within the four walls of PDS Health. We needed to figure out a way that we could expand it so that other partners that believe in the same things we believe could take advantage of it. So, that’s the genesis of the company. How do we serve PDS Health, but [also] how do we create some flexibility that our other partners that are filling the same role with patients could take advantage of too.
Q: How does this new business advance medical-dental integration?
PR: The aspiration is medical-dental integration. The research shows mouth-body connection is important, but it stays an aspiration, and you have this tool limitation that you impose on yourself if you don’t solve for that. So, [what we’re focused on] with this new business helping others is being able to say, Okay, if you have this medical-grade EHR and if you have it appropriately configured to the care you’re giving within the oral health arena, you can now use this and educate yourself on a patient’s medical history without putting the full burden on the patient to show up with all of their information … That’s too much of a burden to put on a patient, and especially with technology, with interoperability, the design needs to be that we’re collaborating with the rest of the patient’s care team, the rest of their larger healthcare universe. By having Epic and having the access to medical records for patients, it now puts us in a position of not asking the patient to carry every ounce of that. We can talk about the mouth-body connection, not in theoreticals, but we can say, “Hey, it looks like you might have this medical condition and you’re seeing this healthcare partner that we know in the community to help solve it. Did you know that if we align the treatments you’re doing there with the treatments we’re going to do for oral health, there’s a synergy. You’ll get better quicker across your whole body.” At the crux of it, that’s the conversation that we want to enable our dentists and our clinicians to have.
Q: What goals do you have for the business going forward?
PR: There are some tactical goals, and then there are some more strategic goals. Tactically, one of the biggest opportunities we have in the market right now, and really this is kind of what pushed us into creating PDS Health Technologies, is feedback we were getting from dental schools. Dental schools realize how important the mouth-body connection is. One of the things we’ve heard is, they can teach something in the classroom, but they don’t have the platform to let dentists in training exercise it when they’re in the operatories. That’s something we want to solve. We have a handful of organizations right now that we’re focused on that are dental schools … What happens if you are able to take a dentist who’s learning something in school, and then later that afternoon, they’re able to practice it and eventually be graded on how well they can incorporate medical-dental integration with this high performance dental platform? When that dental student graduates, they are a better, more capable dentist. The impact they’re going to have in the market is going to be so much more advanced. Their learning curve is going to improve so much more versus the dental students of yesterday. We view that as a really large focus. This year, we want to make sure as many of those dental schools that are out there that are interested, we’re answering that call.
More strategically, this [business] is new. Not only is this new, but PDS Health is a relatively new brand in the market because we spent time last year going through that [rebrand] to heighten the fact that we are dental, we are medical and we are professional services and technology services. I think there’s a lot of market education we need to do. It’s for us to be able to say, hey, we’ve developed this business so that we have the capabilities to serve partners that believe in the same things we believe in lots of different ways. We have to be able to learn too, so [we are] putting ourselves in a position as trusted advisors and strategic partners to listen to what their problems are. [We’re] really just trying to develop larger relationships and awareness in the market for what we’re going to do, and that hopefully drives an advancement for what our innovation agenda and our solution agenda is going to look like.
