Dental Tourism in the United States: Exploring the Impact of Perceived Knowledge and Exposure on Clinical Screening Practices for a Sample of Dentists

Abstract

Dental tourism (DT) is an expanding industry within medical tourism and involves patients traveling outside of their home country to other destinations to receive dental services, often due to cost issues. There has been very little research empirically studying DT from the dentists’ perspective to date, including no studies of United States (US) dentist perceptions. An anonymous survey administered through Qualtrics was completed by 74 US dentists, assessing perceived DT knowledge, DT exposure, and DT clinical screening practices, along with demographic variables including gender, age, length of dental service, and dental specialty. These three DT multi-item measures are new to the DT literature. The mean for the DT clinical screening practices variable was very low indicating that dentists did not typically include screening patients for their DT history, asking about this on intake forms, or determining patient interest in DT. Only DT exposure significantly explained DT clinical screening practices. Male dentists had higher perceived DT knowledge than female dentists. Study limitations and future research directions are discussed.