Data and data analysis defines a big part of what we do in Soothing Dental. We try to help our patients by providing the best dental and oral care possible.
We study our patients to understand what factors impact their oral health; and as a part of that, we are now publishing the results of that study. The study is done using 2000+ patients, ages between 15 and 80 years old. The goal of our study was to find out what factors correlate to patients’ oral health.
Disclaimer: please keep in mind that this study is merely stating factual data for our, rather sizable, sample set. We do NOT claim a causality between the discussed factors and one’s oral health. However, we do see correlations which we discuss in this post.
In this study, we looked into the impact of two factors on one’s oral health:
- The duration that one has been with Soothing Dental
In particular, we wanted to find out if we can learn from our more healthy patients to improve other groups.
To conduct this study, we used oral health score as an indication of how healthy someone is (in terms of oral and dental health). This number is a number between 1 and 100. The higher it is, the better the oral health is. You can read about how this number is calculated here.
The impact of age on oral health
It’s important to mention, that there are super healthy patients at any age (patients with oral health score = 100). Having said that, the minimum score tends to improve after 25. Patients who are younger than 25 have a better health score (in terms of its minimum) than 25 year olds.
This can be attributed to younger adults leaving their parents’ house and becoming independent. They tend to have better oral health while under the supervision of their parents. Once they leave the house, their health degrades significantly but will improve over time.
The average score of oral health follows a slightly different pattern specially for people older than 65. The average oral health decreases at this age (but the minimum improves). This can potentially mean that many people get better at taking care of their teeth while a certain percentage of people (who used to be very good at it), don’t care as much and as a result the score for the upper quartile in this group drops (and therefore, the average score drops).
Many factors such as having better paying jobs, the discipline that is provided by parents and dental insurance coverage attribute to this observation. We will publish more information on this as we get them.
The impact of how long people come to our offices
As much as we were sure that we provide the highest quality of dental care in modern dentistry in Bay Area, we wanted to see this in action. The question was “do people’s oral health improve the more that they stay with Soothing Dental?”.
It is helpful to know another related piece of information (not shown in this graph) when analyzing this chart. The “6-months” period is considered the cliff for patients. That means that once they pass the 6 months period, they are likely to stay with Soothing Dental for a long time. Therefore, the 6-months segment in this graph includes the patients who come for a visit or two and didn’t start or continue with their treatment. That can be because of many reasons but most importantly it’s because of their insurance coverage.
After we pass the cliff period (the first 6 months), the longer patients have been with Soothing Dental, the better all metrics (average, minimum, etc) related to oral health score get. Once patients stay with Soothing Dental for 2 years, the average score becomes 85 (which is considered a very healthy and good score).
Parental supervision, dental insurance coverage and persistence play significant roles in one’s dental health. It’s important to understand and be aware of these factors to ensure we can leverage what works for groups with better dental score to improve other groups. We at Soothing Dental use these learnings to educate and treat patients more effectively in ways that are more sustainable and easier and more efficient to achieve.
If you like to know more about our approach to dentistry, leave a comment or talk to us (using the chat widget). Ready to become a Soothing Dental patient and come to the dental office of the future? Book your appointment now or install our app and come for your first visit.