Dental boards can reveal doctors’ names, narrow search for Medicaid info

Ken Alltucker

I’ve gotten some great tips in the past few weeks about using Medicaid data to uncover abuses in dental care. Each reporter I’ve interviewed has used the data in different ways to support their stories, hopefully giving you some ideas about how to explore the issue.

ABC News ran Hidden America: Medicaid's Youngest Face Dental Crisis in April 2012.

Today, I’m looking at Ken Alltucker’s recent Arizona Republic story about mobile dental clinics. His story is an example of focusing the dental data to one specific area, eliminating the need to parse a pile of data.

Ken writes that the dental clinics visit area schools to serve children enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program. “The children may not have a regular dentist or may live in rural areas with limited access to care,” the story says.

The story idea stemmed from dentists’ criticism about mobile clinics, he says.  Ken turned to the Arizona Board of Dental Examiners, which issues permits to the mobile dental providers, to get a list of companies, he says. Once he had the list, he narrowed his Medicaid payment requests to just those dentists.

“From there, it was a matter of doing the usual reporting – searching for court records and interviewing dentists, company representatives, patients and regulators,” he says.

Since the story ran, Ken says he’s heard from former employees of dental providers and has submitted a public records request for more detailed information about payments to both mobile dental providers and dentists with physical locations.