Expanding the Dental Team: Studies of Two Private Practices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than 50 countries have improved access to dental care by allowing providers other than dentists to offer routine preventive and restorative care, such as filling cavities. In comparison to dentists, such midlevel providers—dental therapists and hygienists with extra training in restorative care—require less education, perform fewer procedures, and command lower salaries. Research has confirmed that they provide high-quality, cost-effective routine care, and improve access to treatment in parts of the country where dentists are scarce. In the United States, these types of providers are already working in Alaska and Minnesota, and an additional 15 states are considering allowing them to do the same.Policymakers and dental practitioners have asked important questions about how dental practices might be affected by these midlevel providers. To answer these questions, Pew conducted an extensive, in-depth examination of two private dental practices that employ dental therapists: a Minnesota practice where a dental therapist has been working since early 2012, and a practice in Saskatchewan, Canada, that has employed a dental therapist for more than 30 years. Because Canada's dental care delivery system is similar to that of the United States—residents obtain private dental insurance or pay out of pocket for care—a Canadian practice was chosen to illustrate a mature practice model.This is the first report to reveal early cost-impact findings of a dental therapist on a private practice in the United States and to describe how these providers are functioning on a daily basis—the patients they see, the procedures they conduct, the supervision they receive, and how they coordinate with the rest of the dental team.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it