Teledentistry.com is rolling out a new system to help members learn about their insurance benefits.
The company soft-launched its Member Engagement for Sustainable Healthcare system, also known as MESH, last year and will expand its use this year.
Vilas Sastry, DMD, CEO of Teledentistry.com, recently spoke with Becker's about the new system and the trend he's following in teledentistry today.
Note: This response has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Can you tell me more about how MESH works?
Dr. Vilas Sastry: It is an omnichannel engagement system that communicates with policyholders of insurance companies through text, social and email. The system reaches members where they are, educating them about their policy benefits and simultaneously providing them with virtual care if they need it. It kind of touches upon different aspects of why a person purchases dental insurance. Dentistry as a whole is interesting in that it caters to both the needs and wants of an individual simultaneously. People want "healthy, pain-free" teeth and a "whiter" or "a straighter smile," which are expressions of both needs and wants. Through the system, we're able to educate members about their benefits, provide them with consultative services and then guide them to a local provider who can actually render the care. So that's really the way in which we've partnered with our clients to help their members understand their benefits and get a better wholesome experience with the policy they purchased.
Q: How did the idea for this system come about?
VS: We've been working on this since about 2019. The learning curve and acceleration of the digitization of everything really went through the roof during 2020 thanks to the pandemic. There was this immediate need the whole world had to address, which was how do we handle every single dental practice being shut down? That's just unprecedented and probably will never be repeated in the history of the world.
With the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, the question now becomes how do you make teledentistry accessible to the member population so there is increased awareness of the service and the benefits that come from having a dentist available to you 24/7? That's where the education process comes in. The MESH system was already on our roadmap but because of COVID, we had to put it on the back burner and hyper-focus on what was at hand. Now that that's all said and done, we're now able to effectuate this and get it going.
Q: How have members been enjoying the system?
VS: The membership has responded really well to our outreach because it’s hyperpersonalized based on the member's benefits. We tailor the system to each client and what they want to have their members get educated about. This is vastly superior to traditional engagement methods, which involve print or in-person mobile outreach. With print-based outreach, the carrier sends a postcard out to somebody, where a lot of money is spent — the printing, the postage and then the logistics behind sending it out. The second option is to put a team member in a mobile unit of some kind and then render care accordingly. The carrier is hoping the population they serve will justify the resource outlay, and as we all know, hope is not a business strategy. These options are extremely expensive, and not very effective if you think about it because you don't know whether members will actually take action and generate the kind of results one is hoping for. With the MESH system, we're able to directly communicate with the member, and we know what benefits they have because our client has informed us accordingly, and then we're able to tailor the messaging with content-driven assets that speak to the member about what they can get and where to receive the care accordingly.
The clients we have are incredibly happy because now they don't have to waste money on postage and things of that nature. Instead, now they have an outsized value by implementing the MESH system. We can track all of the clicks and the likes that have taken place on these digital destinations and report it back to the client.
Q: Do you plan to add more features to the system in the future?
VS: The MESH system we've developed is a communications platform, which the carrier client can customize with modules they want. In addition to servicing our dental insurance clients, we also have multiline carrier clients, with members who have both medical and dental policies. With such implementations, we focus on getting members educated on both their medical and dental benefits in a meaningful way that provides clear clinical outcomes. Those are the kinds of communications we can start effectuating now by combining these sorts of educational materials and then also servicing them as they go forward.
Q: What other trends in teledentistry are you following right now?
VS: We are licensed dentists, and so as such, it's not like we're Silicon Valley kids coming up with an idea in the garage and then just launching it out there and seeing what happens. This is healthcare at the end of the day. So we have licenses, we have liability, so we have to walk the legislative lines very carefully. With new technologies coming out at the pace that they are, legislation is playing catch up. It's our responsibility as clinicians to anticipate what those legislative actions are going to be and navigate our strategies in advance of the legislation being passed. Recently in Nevada, they passed a rather sweeping teledentistry law, which was absolutely awesome. It protected the good aspects of teledentistry, such as what we're doing, which is education, emergency-related services and screening services. That's the way in which I foresee more legislation coming down the pipeline to further strengthen the kind of teledentistry we are providing.