Access to Care – Dental Health
This indicator reports the number of dentists in the report area as a rate per 100,000 total population. This indicator includes all dentists – qualified as having a doctorate in dental surgery (D.D.S.) or dental medicine (D.M.D.), who are licensed by the state to practice dentistry and who are practicing within the scope of that license. Data from the 2022 Area Health Resources File (AHRF) are used in the 2025 County Health Rankings.
Note: Data are suppressed for counties with population greater than 4,000 and 0 dentists.
Source
Accessed via County Health Rankings.
Source Description
The Area Health Resource File (AHRF) is a database of information about the U.S. health care system, maintained and released annually by the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The AHRF contains more than 6,000 variables, aggregated for each of the nation’s counties. The ARF contains information on health facilities, health professions, health status, economic activity, health training programs, measures of resource scarcity, and socioeconomic and environmental characteristics. In addition, the basic file contains geographic codes and descriptors which enable it to be linked to many other files and to aggregate counties into various geographic groupings.
The ARF integrates data from numerous primary data sources including: the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the American Osteopathic Association, the Bureau of the Census, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly Health Care Financing Administration), Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics and the Veteran’s Administration.
For more information, please visit HRSA’s Area Health Resource File website.
Methodology
Access to dentists data was acquired from the University of Wisconsin’s County Health Rankings (CHR). This measure represents the rate of dentists per 100,000 population. Data for this indicator are acquired from the 2022-23 Area Health Resource File database (AHRF) National Provider Identifier Downloadable File. Rates are calculated per 100,000 total population using the following formula:
Population figures in the AHRF are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Resident Population Estimates. For detailed source information, please review the information here.
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