CareQuest Innovation Partners and Kno2 have announced a strategic partnership aimed at integrating dental care into the national health information exchange infrastructure, bridging a crucial gap in healthcare delivery. This collaboration seeks to address the challenges of information sharing between dental and medical providers, improving patient outcomes by ensuring that critical health information follows patients into the dental chair.
The gap in information exchange often puts patients at risk. For instance, a patient on blood thinners may face heightened bleeding risks, or a cancer survivor may experience immune complications that impact oral health. When medical information doesn’t follow the patient into dental care, providers may be forced to make decisions without a full clinical understanding, leading to potential complications or missed warning signs of systemic disease. This issue is particularly pronounced among seniors, medically complex individuals, and underserved populations.
Despite a growing recognition of the connection between oral and systemic health, dental care remains disconnected from broader health interoperability frameworks. A study by CareQuest Institute for Oral Health found that medical providers are almost twice as likely to identify medications prescribed by other organizations using their electronic health record (EHR) systems compared to dental providers. This disconnect limits effective care coordination, slows down medical-dental integration (MDI), and disproportionately impacts patients who experience fragmented care.
Through this partnership, CareQuest Innovation Partners is acting as a national catalyst for integrating dental care into the broader healthcare system. By providing capital, connections, and advisory support, the initiative leverages Kno2’s nationwide network to create a scalable pathway for dental organizations to participate in secure, bidirectional data exchange with medical providers, payers, and health systems. This includes enabling medical-to-dental and dental-to-medical referrals, providing clinical information at the point of care, and ensuring dental records are available to patients.
“With the integration of dental into the broader health ecosystem, providers will have a more complete understanding of the patient,” said Katie D’Amico, Vice President of Growth & Innovation at CareQuest Innovation Partners. “This will improve patient safety, reduce administrative waste, foster medical-dental innovation, and strengthen health equity. We are not just talking about interoperability—we’re actively working to make it a reality.”
Two leading electronic dental record (EDR) platforms, covering approximately 20 percent of the dental market, have already committed to the initiative as flagship partners. The goal is to accelerate integration and have production go-live within six months, with the aim of achieving adoption among 25 percent of participating EDR provider users in the first year. The initiative invites other organizations across the healthcare ecosystem to help advance the connectivity necessary for integrated, whole-person care.
Looking toward the future, the partnership aims to:
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Fully integrate dental care into the national health information exchange infrastructure
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Enable nationwide connectivity for dental providers
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Expand secure information exchange to the millions of patients they serve
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Establish scalable, permanent participation for oral health within the broader healthcare ecosystem
Therasa Bell, Founder and President of Kno2, emphasized the urgency of this work. “When providers lack access to critical health information, patients feel the impact. With increasing federal interoperability requirements and growing scrutiny on healthcare costs and system inefficiencies, now is the time to fully bring dental into the connected ecosystem of healthcare.”
By aligning their efforts, CareQuest Innovation Partners and Kno2 are working to ensure that dental care is no longer sidelined in the broader conversation around healthcare interoperability, setting the stage for a more integrated and efficient future.
