A recent report shows that Santa Monicans don't believe their City is full of top-notch dentists. In fact, the inaugural Dentist Quality Report, conducted by healthcare discovery platform Opencare, shows that patients gave Santa Monica a D for “dental satisfaction.”
The Dentist Quality Report evaluated cities and states nationwide across multiple metrics to determine where patients are most satisfied, as well as what key factors drive satisfaction. According to the report, the metric that correlates strongest with overall satisfaction is the level of trust patients have in their dentist.
To create the report, Opencare.com analyzed over 56,000 dentists across the United States. The analysis looked at over 250,000 individual online patient reviews on subjects such as a patients level of trust in their dentist's decisions, how well the patient's dentist explained medical condition(s), and the level of staff friendliness and courteousness at a dentist's office.
Opencare then evaluated cities and states against one another along multiple metrics. A detailed write up explaining the report's methodology can be obtained by contacting Eva Tang, vice president of Data Science at Opencare.
“After months of analyzing thousands of individual patient reviews, the data shows that patients give Santa Monica dentists the 10th lowest grade in California for overall satisfaction,” Tang said. “Creating a dental environment that is attractive to patients is more important now than ever, and Santa Monica definitely has room for improvement.”
Though the report, which ranked the City 28th out of the 38 cities analyzed in California, was grim in the overall ranking, it did show a few things area dentists can be proud of, including the fact that Santa Monica has the highest grade (A) in “scheduling speed.” The report also showed that Santa Monica came in 2nd in Southern California in staff friendliness (B-), ahead of Los Angeles (C-) and San Diego (C+). Santa Monica patients also “trust their dentist” more than patients in Santa Barbara (D), Los Angeles (C-) and San Diego (C-).
According to the report, after 15 years of stagnant growth, dental expenditure in the U.S. is projected to increase 5.8 percent every year until 2023, totaling $650.2 billion dollars spent on dentistry by private health insurers alone.
Despite this, there are very few reports that look directly at the quality of dentists and what patients are saying about them.
"With the increase of newly insured patients seeking dental care for the first time due to programs such as Obamacare, dentists need to better understand the needs of patients,” said Francois Mathieu, lead on the report at Opencare. “Before the Dental Quality Report, there was no analysis to shed any light on the quality of dental care in the country. With this data, Opencare is hoping to empower dentists with the knowledge of what patients care about so they know where to focus their efforts when trying to create a great patient experience."
The full results of Santa Monica's Dentist Quality Report can be found at https://www.opencare.com/dentists/santa-monica-ca/. The report also includes the full sets of rankings for other cities in California.
jennifer@www.smdp.com
