‘How do we work as allies?’

A version of this Q&A first appeared in the Dental Bite Newsletter. Sign up to here to receive the weekly newsletter.

By Carrie Pallardy | for Dental Bite

How can a chief dental officer (CDO) help guide an insurance company’s clinical strategy? Todd Gray, DDS, offers his perspective as the new CDO at Sun Life U.S., which provides a wide range of benefits to millions of Americans. 

Dr. Gray practiced as a pediatric dentist before stepping into clinical leadership roles with the State of Nevada, Teledentistry.com and DentaQuest. He looks back at his career and shares how he hopes

What first led you to clinical leadership roles?

I come from a dental background. My dad was an endodontist for about 40 years.So I grew up around dentists my whole life, which didn't necessarily make me want to go into dentistry. I was familiar with that as a career. At one point, I was a substitute teacher after college, but I had a degree in biology. And I always enjoyed working with children and trying to have a positive impact on people's lives.

I had taken the dental entrance exams, the DAT, because I was a biology major. I got to the point where I thought, ‘I need to apply now if I'm going to do this.’ I wanted to go into pediatric dentistry because I wanted to be able to again work with that population. 

So, I was accepted to the University of Iowa for dental school and was fortunate enough to also get accepted into their pediatric residency program. I set up my practice from scratch and moved into the managed care and Medicaid world and then commercial. 

I had always been very involved in the Medicaid world to start out with in my pediatric practice and worked with the state of Nevada, trying to get access for children who are on state government benefits, providing care to special needs populations in the area. Through that, I got to work with the Nevada Medicaid folks quite a bit.

When our state moved to managed care, I was made aware of the fact that there was a position open for a part-time state dental director and I just threw my hat in the ring. I like working with this group and was fortunate enough to get that part-time state dental director position. I eventually ended up climbing the ladder with them and became their chief dental officer at one point and also oversaw their quality management team.

I've been working in managed care since late 2016. I really enjoy the opportunity to have an impact on a national level and take the clinical knowledge that I've gained through my career. 

I've worked with Liberty Dental Plan, also a great company. During the pandemic, I had an opportunity to come over and join a technology startup, a telehealth company, that was trying to play a role in expanding care to people during that time, when people were limited at going to the dentist's office. 

I took that as an opportunity to jump in and help out with that organization and I started doing some consulting work. I was fortunate enough to meet some of the team members from DentaQuest at the time, and I got involved working with them and helping them on the business development and the network side of things. I helped on a number of different projects that they're working on, including some value-based care concepts and medical-dental integrations.

What attracted you to the CDO role at Sun Life?

Sun Life acquired DentaQuest a few years back. So, I got to work with the Sun Life team and I really enjoyed the work as a consultant. When they had an opportunity for the chief dental officer role, it checked all the boxes on the various things I've done over the last nine years. It just seemed like a great opportunity. I threw my hat in the ring for that and was fortunate enough to be chosen for the position.

What are some of your top priorities for enhancing Sun Life’s clinical strategy?

One of the things we really want to do is flip the narrative that if you’re a dentist and you're talking to a dental benefits administrator or insurance company, that they automatically have to be an adversary.

One of my biggest goals here is to try to flip that narrative and say: We are your colleagues. We want to be your ally. We want to work with you to achieve the goals and to provide the patient care and to increase the access for the members that you treat and to do that in a way that we are helping you to deliver quality care. The patient sitting in your chair ends up healthy regardless of what needs to be done. You eliminate or try to minimize the disease and then keep them in a state of health.

How do we get that messaging out there to the dentists across the country? Because we look at dentists as our clients. That's the bottom line. How do we better serve them as a partner? 

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in dental advocacy right now?

In the insurance field for dentistry, and for medicine as well, there's a lot of need. There's a lot of pent-up need coming out of the pandemic for people who require care. 

There is also a need to get people to understand the importance of dental care, how that ties into overall systemic and medical health and get that messaging out there to let people understand that if you have, say, uncontrolled diabetes, that's going to directly relate to your oral health. If you have poor oral health and periodontal disease, that's going to exacerbate your diabetes or your heart condition. So, that's one of the things that we need to try to do is get that message out there.

The other thing is to try to let people understand where they can go for help, where they can get dental care, how they can access it. We work with what we call network teams, the provider engagement teams, to talk to the dentists. We want to help them get the members, the patients, into the office.

We want to come up with new innovations and concepts that will make everybody's lives a little bit easier on both sides of the equation, whether it's a member looking to get into an office or a dentist trying to get the patient in there. How do we leverage things like artificial intelligence? How do we leverage telehealth? How do we work on improving the claims process, the preauthorization process and the payment process? All these things are certainly high on our priority list. 

Is there anything else you are particularly excited about in the world of dentistry?

I think there's a lot of opportunity in dentistry. Where we are at with materials and with technology, the future is bright for dentists and for patients. So. I think that's exciting and I think that we take it seriously at Sun Life. That it is part of our job to work on and come up with these innovations and to be able to get them out to the market. 

I'm extremely excited about what the vision is for our president, who created this role. What we're looking to do is take all of these talented clinicians that work within the Sun Life family, so we can leverage all of their knowledge, all of their skill sets and bring them together to open up communication. Ultimately, what that's going to do is result in better service that we can provide to the dentists in our network.

The message that I've been trying to get out to organizations, whether that's the American Dental Association, American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, the Medicaid and Medicare services, we want all of those organizations to understand that we are here to help. We have a vision. We want to be a partner in providing for all of the people that we are fortunate enough to serve. We want to work with them and create advisory boards for these groups, where we can get their input, hear what their concerns are, hear what works well, what doesn't work well and try to find ways that we can get a common ground to work together to just make everything better. 

We're not working in a vacuum here. We're not trying to hide anything. We want to be transparent. And we all, ultimately,  want to be there for the people that come in and need dental care. What it boils down to is: How are you serving your neighbor that comes in with a toothache? How are we serving your neighbor who could use good oral healthcare to help their systemic situation? How do we work as allies to get there? And that's what I'm excited about, and that's what we have an opportunity to do.

Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.