Prohibits the use of patient quotas for selecting dental treatments

Justification

Dentists should have unfettered access to all necessary treatment modalities to serve their patients and should be able to choose those modalities based on the clinical needs of the patient in the professional judgment of the dentist, not based on the need to meet numerical quotas. Certain manufacturers of drugs, dental devices, and other dental treatment services are beginning to use marketing practices where they will not provide a drug, device, or treatment service to a dentist unless the dentist commits to using the product on a specific quota of patients. This practice interferes with the professional judgment of the dentist and is harmful to patients. Unless a dentist is willing to commence unnecessary treatments just to meet a quota, the dentist may lose access to the treatment modality for patients who would best benefit from it. Alternatively, the dentist may be forced to use treatments that are not the best treatment option for certain patients, because of being unable to access the best option due to failure to meet a quota. Such quota requirements are the antithesis of professionalism and are a blatant attempt to boost marketing of products at the expense of the patients those products are intended to serve.

In addition, the quota requirements are anticompetitive and often tend to raise the cost of services to patients, because they reduce the number of dentists who can provide the treatment to the patient. For example, one company requires that a dentist must use its orthodontic treatment modality on at least ten patients per year in order to obtain access to the treatment. Most general dentists would not use this treatment modality on that many patients in a given year, so the net effect of the quota is either to drive patients to more expensive specialists who might use the treatment modality more often or else to have general dentists needlessly use the treatment more often just to fill the quota. Neither the public nor the dental profession is served by such a quota requirement. Some manufacturers have tried to disguise such quotas as "product proficiency" or "quality control" mechanisms, but this overlooks the fact that dentists are licensed by the State of New York for the purpose of being competent to handle all dental modalities, or else not use them at all. These so-called quality justifications have no data or studies to back them up and are not real. The quota system is just another example of a marketing tactic that rewards manufacturers for promoting inefficient and potentially inappropriate care. These kinds of marketing abuses need to be stopped and the proposed law will accomplish that goal with respect to patient quotas, one of the worst of such abuses.

Prior legislative history

None. FISCAL IMPLICATIONS : None.

Effective date

Immediately upon the date on which it shall become law.