Independent watchdog project. Not affiliated with the State of California, DHCS or Medi-Cal Dental.
Not the State of California
Every dental plan in this program is required by law to appoint a named, licensed dentist who answers for its clinical decisions and personally handles quality of care complaints. Finding a dentist in these networks is hard enough. Finding the dentist in charge turns out to be harder.
The job exists because the law says so
A dental plan is a company. Companies are run by executives, and executives answer to owners. California decided that was not a safe arrangement for deciding whether somebody gets a root canal, so it required something else: a named dentist, inside the plan, whose job is to stand between the clinical decision and the balance sheet.
The rule is short, it has been on the books since 1994, and it applies to every dental plan in the program.
The regulation
Each PHP and PCCM plan shall appoint a physician as medical director and each dental plan shall appoint a dentist as dental director.
The same section then lists what the job involves. All six of these are the dental director's responsibility, and the regulation says the list is a floor, not a ceiling.
Duty one
Ensuring dental decisions are rendered by qualified dental personnel, unhindered by fiscal or administrative management.
Duty two
Ensuring the dental care provided meets the standards for acceptable dental care.
Duty three
Ensuring dental protocols and rules of conduct for plan personnel are followed.
Duty four
Developing and implementing dental policy.
Duty five
Resolving dental quality of care related grievances, and referring other grievances to the grievance coordinator.
Duty six
Actively participating in the functioning of the plan grievance procedures.
Read duty one again
Unhindered by fiscal or administrative management. The regulation anticipates, in writing, that a plan's finance and admin side might lean on a clinical decision, and it makes one named dentist responsible for seeing that it does not.
The contract
The state's standard dental managed care contract repeats the regulation and tightens it.
That last requirement is the interesting one. The state wants to know within ten days if the person holding this job changes. Members are not told at all.
Source: DHCS Dental Managed Care boilerplate contract, Exhibit A, Attachment 2, Organization and Administration of the Plan, sections F and G.
Where this connects
Duty five is resolving quality of care grievances. Duty six is actively participating in the grievance procedures. The DHCS contract says the same thing from the other direction: grievances about quality of care shall be referred to the Contractor's Dental Director.
So when a Medi-Cal member complains that the care was bad, the law intends that complaint to land on a specific dentist's desk.
Now read that against what California's regulator has actually fined these plans for.
California Dental Network, trading as DentaQuest, August 2026. Cited for failure to adequately consider an enrollee's grievance, and failure to establish and maintain a department approved grievance system. This was the company's commercial dental business rather than Medi-Cal, and the conduct dates from 2023, before it held a Medi-Cal contract.
See the ledgerDHCS auditors recorded that Health Net did not give members clear and concise explanations of the decisions in its grievance resolution letters, and that the same deficiency was uncorrected from the previous audit.
See the auditPut plainly
The grievance duties belong to the dental director. The grievance failures are what the plans keep getting fined for. Those two facts sit in the same program. All three plans have a dental director named further down this page. What the enforcement orders and the audit findings never do is name a person, because they are written about the company.
A question worth asking
The regulation requires each dental plan to appoint a dentist as dental director. Health Net of California is a licensed dental plan in this program, so it needs one.
But the provider manual that governs Health Net's dental network is DentaQuest's, and it routes clinical decisions to DentaQuest's dental director. Dentists are told to submit proposed treatment plans to DentaQuest's Dental Director or the Dental Director's designee. If a dentist wants to argue a decision, the manual tells them to request a peer to peer discussion with a DentaQuest dental director. utilization trends, quality issues from case management, and provider corrective action plans all report to the dental director in that manual.
Health Net does have a dental director, and we can name him. The next section does. That does not settle the question. It sharpens it. There are two dental directors in the picture for one member's teeth: the one the regulation requires Health Net to appoint, and the one the manual tells dentists to send their treatment plans to.
We are not saying that is improper. Plans are allowed to hire vendors, and this manual does it in the open, on Health Net's own website. The point is narrower than that. The state regulation writes the duty for the plan, the federal rule says the plan keeps ultimate responsibility no matter who it hires, and the manual still points the treatment decisions at the vendor's dental director.
Worth remembering: grievances and appeals are the one function DentaQuest's manual says it is not delegated for. Those stay with Health Net. Which would mean the quality of care grievances that duty five assigns to a dental director go to a different company than the clinical decisions do. More on that split.
Source: Provider Office Reference Manual, California Dental Managed Care, effective 1 July 2025, published by DentaQuest and hosted on Health Net's own website.
Meet the dental directors
All three plans are named on this page, and this is the first of them. Note where the name comes from. Health Net itself told the state it hired him, and the California Department of Health Care Services published that report. His current title comes from the Center for Oral Health's advisory council listing, and the description of the job from his own biography. Every fact below carries a source, and the sources are listed at the end of the profile.
Dental Director, Health Net
The Center for Oral Health lists him on its advisory council as Dental Director, Health Net. His own website describes the role without naming the company: he is Dental Director for a Managed Care Dental Plan in the State of California with oversight for one of the three Medicaid Managed Care Dental Plans in the Los Angeles and Sacramento Counties. That is the role this page has been describing, and the duties in the regulation are his.
1986
Graduates from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine with a fifth-year concentration in Health Care Administration.
1986 to 2003
Clinician and dental director across Medicaid dental programs. Works with a migrant farm population at the Laredo Webb County Health Department in Texas, at Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the first federally qualified health center in the country, and oversees the Boston HealthCare for the Homeless dental program.
2000 to 2009
Owns and operates two private dental offices on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, serving Medicaid and commercial patients. Also serves as an expert advisor to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and its Board of Registration in Dentistry.
March 2006 to April 2009
Dental Medicaid Director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, working with the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. His own account says the job involved revising the state's Medicaid dental regulations and overseeing Medicaid compliance by contracted dentists.
2009 to 2017
Academia. Associate Dean for Community Partnerships and Access to Care, facilitating accreditation of two new dental schools: Western University of Health Sciences College of Dental Medicine in Pomona, and the University of New England College of Dental Medicine in Portland, Maine. Faculty appointments have also included Harvard, Boston University Goldman School of Graduate Dentistry, and Tufts.
2012
Appointed to the Dental Hygiene Committee of California, the body that issues, reviews and enforces dental hygiene licenses. Reappointed by Governor Jerry Brown in March 2018. The seat pays 100 dollars per diem and does not require Senate confirmation. He has since served as the committee's president.
2012
According to Dentistry Today, he begins a relationship with the managed care organization DentaQuest in this year. See the statement below.
2017 onward
Chief Dental Officer of the Borrego Community Health Foundation, a federally qualified health center in San Diego County. Dentistry Today, citing the foundation's filings, reports his total compensation for the financial year ending June 2019 as 458,134 dollars.
Now
Dental Director, Health Net, with oversight of one of the three Medi-Cal dental managed care plans in Los Angeles and Sacramento counties.
“Martinez also initiated a relationship with managed care organization DentaQuest in 2012 that continues today.”
Dentistry Today, FBI Raids Federally Qualified Healthcare Provider Dental Clinics, 12 November 2020. “Continues today” refers to the date of that article. We state this as the publication's claim. Neither Dr Martinez nor DentaQuest has published anything confirming or disputing it, and we have asked neither.
Borrego Health was the subject of a federal and state investigation while he was its chief dental officer. On 20 October 2020 investigators seized computers and medical and dental records from the foundation, and searched the offices of Premier Healthcare Management, which handled its billing. California suspended Medi-Cal payments to the foundation, and in 2022 Borrego Health filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Dental billing was reported to be a focus of the investigation.
To be clear about what that does and does not mean. The investigation and the suspension concerned the organization. We have found no public record accusing Dr Martinez of any wrongdoing, and none charging him with anything. He held a senior role at an organization that was investigated. That is a fact about his career, and it is the only claim we are making here.
In September 2022, questioned by his own attorney in a San Diego Superior Court matter, he described his professional background.
I have done clinical work, but also part of my specialty is Medicaid fraud. So, I have worked with dental investigations both … all over the United States … Basically my background is in Medicaid fraud.
He is describing a specialty in investigating Medicaid fraud, and the publication that reported the testimony reads it the same way. We include it because the plain fact is worth knowing: the dentist responsible for one of the three Medi-Cal dental plans has testified that his background is in Medicaid fraud investigation, having worked on dental investigations across the country.
Neither Health Net nor Dr Martinez publishes a start date, so we went looking for one. Here is what the dated record actually shows.
7 September 2022
Gives the testimony quoted above. The account of that hearing refers to him as Borrego Health's former chief dental officer.
21 September 2022
The domain timothymartinezdmd.com is registered, two weeks later. The registry record gives the exact time: 21 September 2022 at 15:18 UTC.
24 October 2022
The earliest archived copy of the site is already live, and it already says he is currently the Dental Director for a Managed Care Dental Plan in the State of California. It does not say which one.
27 September 2024
DHCS awards the new dental managed care contracts to Health Net, Liberty and California Dental Network (DentaQuest).
15 January 2025
An archived copy of the Center for Oral Health advisory council page does not list him.
1 July 2025
DentaQuest begins administering Health Net's dental plan.
August 2025
The photograph used on the Center for Oral Health page is uploaded to that site.
6 October 2025
The first archived copy of that page listing Timothy Martinez, DMD, Dental Director, Health Net.
Sometime after he worked for Borrego Health. Around the time his biography website was created. And before DentaQuest was contracted as one of the three dental managed care plans in Sacramento and Los Angeles counties.
That places it in the autumn of 2022, within weeks of his leaving Borrego, and roughly two years before the September 2024 contract awards. It is an estimate. His site described the role from October 2022 but never named the plan, so the 2022 evidence puts him at a California dental managed care plan without establishing which one.
“Effective March 1, 2022, Health Net hired a new dental director, Timothy Martinez, DMD.”
Those are Health Net's own words, from its report to the state, published by the California Department of Health Care Services in its Dental Managed Care External Quality Review Technical Report for July 2021 to June 2022, page D-6. That puts his start at Health Net more than six months earlier than our estimate above. Health Net listed the hire first in its response to the state's recommendation that it fully resolve the findings of its 2021 dental audit, and wrote that Dr Martinez was “well suited to conduct oversight” of the utilization and quality management work it had delegated to its outside administrator.
Still in the job? Here is every later record we have found. In October 2023, Sacramento County's Medi-Cal Dental Advisory Committee approved him as a new member, as its Dental Plan Representative for Health Net. In July 2024, the state's external reviewers listed Timothy Martinez, Dental Director, among the Health Net staff they interviewed, in the report for contract year 2023-24, Volume 2, page A-2. In October 2025, the Center for Oral Health listed him as Dental Director, Health Net. He attended the committee's April 2026 meeting and presented for one of its workgroups, and the committee's member list dated August 2026 still names him as Dental Plan Representative (Health Net). That is the most recent record, and we have found none saying he has left.
Center for Oral Health, staff and board for the Health Net title. DHCS Dental Managed Care External Quality Review Technical Report, July 2021 to June 2022, page D-6 for the hire date. Sacramento County Medi-Cal Dental Advisory Committee minutes of 5 October 2023 (archived copy), minutes of 2 April 2026 and member list dated August 2026, for his seat on the committee. DHCS Dental Managed Care External Quality Review Technical Report, contract year 2023-24, Volume 2, page A-2 for the 2024 interview listing. His own biography for education, career history and current role. Times of San Diego, 20 March 2018 for the Dental Hygiene Committee reappointment and the Borrego appointment. Dentistry Today for the compensation figure, the Massachusetts dates and the DentaQuest relationship. National Provider Identifier registry for license numbers and practice location. Becker's Hospital Review for the Borrego Health timeline. Mostly Medicaid for the court testimony and the date of the federal search. Sacramento District Dental Society membership directory. Domain registration from the Verisign registry record for timothymartinezdmd.com. Dated page snapshots from the Internet Archive.
Meet the dental directors
This one we have from the plan's own meeting minutes, in both counties, a week apart.
California Dental Director, California Dental Network (DentaQuest)
California Dental Network (DentaQuest) runs a Community Advisory Committee in each county. Its published minutes list the presenters by name and title, and in both counties he is Dr. Santosh Sundaresan, Dental Director. In Los Angeles the minutes go further and record him saying it himself.
“Santosh Sundaresan introduced himself as the California Dental Director, highlighting his experience with community programs and university affiliations.”
Los Angeles County Community Advisory Committee meeting, minutes of 19 March 2026. He is listed as Dental Director in the agenda of the Sacramento meeting of 12 March 2026 as well.
They are substantial, and they are the opposite of a corporate career. His public record at USC is one of community dentistry.
2005
Graduates from the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC.
Faculty
Assistant professor of clinical dentistry at Ostrow, and Section Chair for Community Health Programs, the part of the school that runs care for people who are not walking into a private practice.
2015
Receives the Dr Arthur A. Dugoni Faculty Award.
Mobile clinics
Directs USC's mobile dental clinic program, including the launch of what the university called its biggest ever mobile dental clinic, and leads a week of treating Special Olympics athletes.
March 2026
Presents clinical updates to the Sacramento advisory committee and the member benefit spotlight in Los Angeles, as California Dental Director.
Dr Katrina Eagilen, Chief Oral Health Access Officer, chaired both meetings and presented the population needs assessments. Anne Peres is the committee coordinator. Both are listed as DentaQuest.
Los Angeles CAC minutes, 19 March 2026 and Sacramento CAC minutes, 12 March 2026, both published by DentaQuest, for the title and the self-introduction. National Provider Identifier registry for the license number and location. USC Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry for the Dugoni award and faculty role, USC for the mobile clinic program, and USC for the Special Olympics week.
Advantage Dental+ is part of DentaQuest. Most states require a dental practice to be owned by a licensed dentist, so a corporate dental group operates through professional corporations, or P.C.s, each with a named dentist as its owner. DentaQuest publishes the list.
“Thommes is the P.C. owner for Advantage Dental+ in Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Texas as well as a P.C. owner for Advantage Dental+ in Alabama.”
Advantage Dental+, Affiliated P.C. Owners. The entities named are Advantage Dental Oral Health Center of Massachusetts, P.C., Advantage Dental Oral Health Center of Oklahoma, P.C., Advantage Dental Oral Health Center of Texas, P.C., and Advantage Dental Oral Health and Vision Center of Alabama, P.C., where the company lists him alongside John Clasen, OD and Cory B. White, DMD. None of these is a California entity.
So the honest statement is this. On the company's own published evidence, Dr Sundaresan is the California Dental Director of California Dental Network (DentaQuest). Whether that is the same appointment the contract requires the plan to report to the state, we cannot yet show, because that record is not public. If you can close that gap, tell us.
Meet the dental directors
This one took the longest, and the answer comes with a date on it.
Liberty runs a Community Advisory Committee for its Medi-Cal members in California, and it publishes the minutes. Each set opens with a roll call listing every member of staff who attended, by name and job title. Liberty tags its dental directors by scope in that list, some with CA and one with NAT, which makes this the clearest labeling of the three plans.
Dental Director, CA, Liberty Dental Plan
“Dr. Angel Sanchez-Figueras, Dental Director, CA”
Liberty Dental Plan, Medi-Cal Dental Community Advisory Committee minutes, fourth quarter 2025, for the meeting held 26 February 2026. The same roll call lists Dr Charles Moser as Dental Director, NAT. An asterisk beside a name means that person has voting rights, and his carries one.
He did not only attend. He chaired. The last page of those minutes is an acknowledgment of committee approval, and it is signed Angel Sanchez-Figueras, DDS, Committee Chair, dated 23 March 2026. His own professional profile gives his title as California Dental Director at Liberty Dental Plan.
Before 2022
A long clinical career, then consulting. Liberty's own newsletter says he had already been a dental director for a managed care plan in California before he arrived.
September 2022
Announces publicly that he has left his role at Guardian and joined Liberty.
Winter 2022
Liberty introduces him to its dentists in its provider newsletter, under the title Dental Director QI, Clinical Affairs CA.
February 2026
Listed in the California advisory committee roll call as Dental Director, CA, with voting rights, and signs the minutes as committee chair the following month.
Liberty Dental Plan, California advisory committee minutes, fourth quarter 2025 for the title, the voting rights and the chair signature, published on the plan's own committee page. Liberty Provider News, Winter 2022 for the arrival title and the earlier managed care role. National Provider Identifier registry for the license number and location.
Then the roster changed
In the very next set of minutes, for the meeting held 28 May 2026, his name is off the roll call altogether. So is Dr Moser's. Three dental directors are listed instead, Dr Afshin Arian, Dr Leta Langford and Dr Tamara Kay-Tibby, and none of them is tagged CA. That is not a sign he has gone. Liberty's own Spring 2026 provider newsletter still lists him among its Medicaid dental directors, so the plain reading is that he did not attend that particular meeting.
A fair question, and Liberty answers it itself. Its provider newsletter carries a leadership page listing the company's Medicaid dental directors state by state. Every one of them has a state in brackets after the title. Exactly one does not.
| Dentist | How Liberty lists the role | Where we can place a license |
|---|---|---|
| Angel Sanchez-Figueras | Medicaid Dental Director, Western Team. The only name on the page with no state after it. | California, 031696 |
| Afshin Arian | Medicaid Dental Director (NV) | Nevada, 3321 |
| Leta Langford | Medicaid Dental Director (OK) | Oklahoma, 6460, and New Mexico, DD3238 |
| Tamara Kay-Tibby | Medicaid Dental Director (FL) | We did not find one in the federal registry |
| Charles Moser | National Dental Director, Clinical Services, which is what the NAT tag on the roll call stands for | We could not establish which listing is his |
Roles from Liberty Dental Plan Quarterly, Spring 2026. Dr Arian's Nevada role is confirmed independently by the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health, whose oral health advisory committee minutes of 22 April 2022 record him as Nevada Dental Director, Liberty Dental Plan. Licenses from the National Provider Identifier registry.
Why the state tags matter
The DHCS contract is specific about this. The Dental Director must maintain a current dental license with the State of California at all times, in good standing at the time of hire and for the whole of their employment. Of the dentists on that California committee roll call, the only one we can place on a California license is Dr Sanchez-Figueras. Dr Arian is Nevada's, Dr Langford is Oklahoma's, Dr Kay-Tibby is Florida's, and Dr Moser's job is a national one.
We are not reading the state tags into the roster. In 2026 Liberty advertised for a Senior Director, Dental for its Medicaid business, and the advert sets the arrangement out plainly. The job is the clinical leader for that line of business, covering utilization management, clinical policy, regulatory compliance and escalated appeals, and the person in it is there to lead, mentor, and support State Dental Directors. A tier of state dental directors is how the company is built.
One detail in that advert is worth putting beside the contract. It asks for an active, unrestricted dental license in at least one U.S. state. For the national job, any one state will do. For the dental director of a Medi-Cal dental plan in California, the contract says it has to be California.
Chief Dental Officer, Liberty Dental Plan, and chair of the California committee
He held the California job before Dr Sanchez-Figueras did, and he is the one chairing the committee now. His route through the company is documented at every step.
2020
Joins Liberty Dental Plan as Dental Director of California.
2023
Presents Liberty's value based care program to a national dental quality conference, billed as Dental Director CA and Clinical Affairs. In May the company announces that he now also serves as dental director for national quality improvement and clinical innovation, and continues as California dental director. For a period he held both.
February 2026
Appears in the California committee roll call as Interim Chief Dental Officer.
May 2026
Appears as Chief Dental Officer, no longer interim, and signs the California committee minutes as chair on 22 June 2026.
Two further details, stated because they bear on where this site is pointed. He is based in Sacramento, the county where this program is not optional. He chaired the Peer Review Committee of the Sacramento District Dental Society from 2019 to 2020 and has served on that society's oral health task force.
National Association of Dental Plans speaker biography for the 2020 start, the promotions, the current role and the Sacramento society positions. Liberty Dental Plan company announcement, May 2023 for the dual role. Fourth quarter 2025 and first quarter 2026 California committee minutes for the interim and confirmed titles and the chair signature. National Provider Identifier registry for the license number and location.
What that committee was told. At the May 2026 meeting the plan reported its own complaint trends to the committee. The leading grievance categories were access and availability and quality of care. The leading appeal categories were crowns and bridges, and root canals. The minutes record that these continue to be the leading categories. Duty five and duty six, further up this page, are the grievance duties, and they belong to a dental director.
One oddity, since it is on every page. Each page of these minutes carries a stamp saying the document and the proceeding shall not be subject to discovery under CA Health and Safety Code 1370 and CA Evidence Code 1157. Both of those statutes shield peer review from being used in court. The Health and Safety Code one covers reviews by peer review committees composed chiefly of physicians and surgeons or dentists. The Evidence Code one covers medical and dental staff committees and peer review bodies.
This committee's own roll call lists forty plan staff, four of whom are dentists, and thirteen outside attendees, seven of them enrollees and six of them community organizations. The minutes give its purpose as making sure members are given a forum with voting rights. Liberty then publishes the whole thing on its public website, with no password, which is where we got our copy.
The bit we cannot finish yet
All three plans now have a name on this page. That is not the same as having the answer.
Here is the problem. Companies of this size have several people with dental director in their title: national directors, regional directors, directors for a particular line of business, chief dental officers. Those are corporate job titles. The role in the regulation is different. It is a specific appointment, made by a specific licensed plan, reported to the state, and changed only with notice to the state within ten days.
Everything on this page is the best public evidence we have found for each plan. For Health Net, that includes the plan's own report to the state, published by DHCS, which dates his hire to 1 March 2022. For DentaQuest, committee minutes. For Liberty, committee minutes and a provider newsletter. Those last two are corporate titles, published by the companies.
None of them is the appointment filing itself. That record exists, because the plans have to file it, and it is not published. The Health Net date is the closest we have come, because it is the plan's own account of the hire in a document the state published. So we are telling you exactly what our sources say and exactly what they do not, rather than dressing a job title up as a statutory appointment.
These are answerable questions. The plans report the appointment to DHCS, and changes within ten days, so the information exists in state hands. We are filing to get it, and we will publish what comes back, including any refusal.
We will name the person holding a statutory public accountability role, because that is what the role is for. We will write about the job, not the private life of whoever does it, and every fact will carry a source.
If you already know, or you have a letter signed by one of them, or a plan document that names one, send it over. A grievance resolution letter or a treatment denial is often signed by a dental director, which makes it the fastest route to an answer.
Show your work
Denial notices and grievance responses are often signed by a dental director. If you have one, you may be holding the answer to this page.