Last updated: August 31, 2026
Directory facts
A clinic page shows a fact only when a source we can name supports it for that specific address. Every published fact keeps four things behind it: what kind of source it came from, the URL where it can be checked, a confidence score, and the date it was verified. Those four are held against the record rather than printed on it: a source URL and a confidence score are working apparatus, and a page of them reads as an audit trail rather than as an answer to the question someone came with. They are the reason a listing can be short and still be trusted, and if you want to know what a particular line rests on, ask us and we will tell you.
Missing information is never treated as a negative answer. If we cannot confirm that a clinic accepts Medicaid, the page says the participation is not confirmed. It does not say the clinic does not accept Medicaid, because we do not know that, and the difference matters to someone deciding whether to make the call.
Why most listings say little
The majority of listings here confirm a single fact: that dental care is provided at that address. Services, payment programs, sliding fee details and opening hours are usually marked as not confirmed. This is the honest result of the sources available, not an unfinished state we are hiding. Filling those fields by inference — assuming a health center offers dentures because health centers often do, or assuming Medicaid participation from a billing identifier — would produce a fuller-looking directory that sends people on wasted journeys. We would rather publish a short listing and tell you exactly what to ask on the phone.
Organization and location are not the same thing
A rule that governs a large share of our decisions: evidence about an organization does not transfer to its individual sites. Health centers commonly operate a dental program at some locations and not others. An organization-wide services page, a parent company’s dental staffing report, or a group listing in a registry may all be true of the organization and false of the address you are looking at. Confirmation therefore requires evidence anchored to that address.
Plain-language guides
Guides and service pages are hand-written general information about how dental care and its costs work in the United States. They are kept structurally separate from clinic records and never describe a specific clinic. They avoid promising eligibility, treatment outcomes, exact prices or insurance coverage, and where costs are discussed they are given as ranges alongside the instruction to obtain a written estimate. They are not medical advice and do not replace an examination.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome from anyone, and reports from clinics about their own listing take priority over third-party descriptions. A correction has to carry the same evidence burden as the original: a material change preserves the source and date of the updated information rather than replacing a sourced fact with an unsourced one. Where a report tells us a fact is wrong but we cannot source the replacement, we remove the fact rather than substitute a guess.
Commercial independence
Inclusion in this directory is not for sale, and neither is any factual label on a listing. No clinic can pay to appear, to rank higher, to gain a payment or service tag, or to have a listing removed on grounds other than accuracy. If advertising or referral arrangements are introduced, they will be labeled where they appear and kept structurally separate from the evidence pipeline that decides what a clinic page says. Advertising revenue has no input into which clinics are listed or what facts are attached to them.
Corrections we have made to ourselves
Early development of this site included placeholder clinic listings with invented payment tags, created before real data was available. They were removed, and the rule against demonstration or generated clinic records is now enforced in the publishing code rather than by memory: the only path a clinic can take into this directory runs through a verification job with a named source. We mention it here because a policy page that only describes intentions is worth less than one that describes what went wrong.