THE DEVELOPMENT OF DENTIST PRACTICE PROFILES AND MANAGEMENT: THE KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY APPROACH

摘要

This study aims at providing an easy, efficient, and practical alternative approach in developing patterns of dental practice profiles. This will help the third-party payer to recognize and describe novel or unusual patterns of dental practice for adopting various strategies in order to prevent fraudulent claims and overcharges. Knowledge discovery (or data mining) was used to cluster the dentists' profiles by carrying out clustering techniques based on the features of service rates. A complete picture is drawn relating to the characteristics of dentists' practice patterns by reducing the attributes space to a smaller number of dimensions, and the detailed managerial guidance is illustrated to support the third-party payer in the management of various patterns of dentist practice.