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December 27, 2012 at 08:09 PM
The Texas Coalition of Dental Support Organizations says its members make dental practices more efficient, by taking over tasks such as marketing, scheduling and billing.
Dentists who don’t use dental service organizations (DSOs) have asked whether the DSOs might not occasionally cross boundaries and interfere with clinical care.
Texas state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, chairman of the state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, has stepped between the DSOs and advocates of stronger state DSO oversight by introducing S.B. 151, a bill that would define a DSO as being an entity that “is owned wholly or partly by a person who is not a dentist, and, under a dental service agreement, provides or offers to provide services to a dentist or employers or otherwise contracts with a dentist in the dentist’s capacity as a dentist.”
The bill would require DSOs to register with the Texas State Board of Dental Examiners, prohibit DSOs from interfering with dentists’ treatment decisions, change the rules governing dental care for children, and let the dental examiners board punish a DSO that violated the Texas Dental Practices Act.
Texas now has no regulations for DSOs, Nelson said in a statement.
“We need to ensure that these organizations are accountable to the board and, more importantly, that they are not substituting their judgment for that of our trained, licensed dentists,” Nelson said.
Texas lawmakers began talking about DSOs after auditors reported that Texas dental practices, including some served by DSOs, had bilked the state Medicaid program by putting braces in the mouths of poor children who did not need braces.
