Harris Contos received both his BA in Economics and DMD degrees from Tufts University and his MBA in Health Care Management from Wharton. His healthcare career has been wide-ranging, including hospital administration, tobacco control, vehicle driver safety, and environmental noise control, diverse management, and public health experiences which provided him with valuable perspectives when he returned to dental health as consultant for oral health programs and policy for the county health department and as director of a community water fluoridation effort on Cape Cod. Both experiences allowed him to plumb the cost, quality, and access issues in dental health, as well as to gain insight into the workings of the dental care industry, the dental profession, and the power players who frame the way dental care is perceived by policy makers, politicians, and the public (pardon the alliteration!).
The advent of the Affordable Care Act, and the dental care provisions both in and not in it, has underscored those cost, quality, and access issues, largely stemming from dentistry’s historic, and continuing, separation from the rest of healthcare. He is presently working at SMART Dental Health (he’ll explain the esoteric “SMART” acronym over drinks at the reception at the next alumni conference), a small group of iconoclastic dentists and dental hygienists developing integrated primary care models of medical and dental care along the value-based care precepts of the ACA.
Contact Harris at: [email protected]