A former West Des Moines, IA, dentist who has been sued six times for medical malpractice has been sanctioned for the third time by the Iowa Dental Board.
The board’s decision, however, comes at least three years after the most recent allegations of misconduct -- during which time, Dr. Jay Jensen’s Iowa dental license expired and he moved to Austin, TX, according to board records.
In August 2024, the board alleged that at some unspecified point in the past, Jensen demonstrated a failure to meet the expected standard of care for a dentist and failed to maintain a level of competency in his work associated with a patient’s tooth restoration and dental implant work.
For months, the patient reported experiencing significant pain and intermittent bleeding related to her implant, the board alleges. At the board’s request, a consultant reviewed Jensen’s work and allegedly concluded his work failed to meet the expected standard of care, although an oral surgeon to whom Jensen referred the patient disagreed, the board says.
Although board records don’t state when the questionable implant work was performed, the board opened its investigation of the matter in 2022.
By September 2024, one week after the board charged Jensen with failing to maintain a reasonable standard of competency in the practice of dentistry, Jensen’s Iowa license expired and he was living in Texas.
Recently, the board opted to settle the case by imposing a $1,500 civil penalty and restricting Jensen’s nonexistent Iowa license to exclude the practice of implant dentistry and restorations. In its order imposing those restrictions, the board acknowledged Jensen no longer practices any form of dentistry in Iowa.
The Iowa Capital Dispatch was unable to reach Jensen for comment.
Six malpractice lawsuits filed by patients
The board’s disciplinary case appears to involve Jensen’s treatment of Madison County resident Stella Vicanovic, who is suing Jensen and the West Des Moines’ Plaza Dental Group, where Jensen worked, for malpractice.
Vicanovic alleged that after her treatment in August 2022, she called Jensen to report an “odd sensation in her nose” and noted she was bleeding from her left nostril and felt as if the tissue there was torn. In October 2022, she allegedly reported she still had a feeling “like tissue had been torn or something was broken” near the site of one implant.
In February 2023, an oral surgeon at the University of Nebraska Medical Center allegedly determined one of the implants had “grossly exposed threads through the bone.” The problems allegedly continued through May 2023 when Vicanovic requested a referral to the Mayo Clinic. In his written referral to the clinic, Jensen allegedly noted that he wondered whether he had “perforated the floor of the nose” while attempting to install one of the implants.
At the Mayo Clinic, doctors allegedly found “metal within, or very close to, the bone just under the left nasal cavity,” the lawsuit claims.
In August 2024, Vicanovic sued, alleging that since the August 2022 procedure, she “has lived with teeth that have been unnecessarily reduced to stubs, when they should have simply been filed for veneers” and left with "ill-fitting veneers and crowns” that have yellowed and emit a foul odor.
“They have begun to fall apart and dissolve,” the lawsuit alleges. “As the result of the overall effort of Dr. Jensen on her teeth, plaintiff is now left with an inability to smile, difficulty chewing food, and a smile which adversely impacts her appearance and challenges with speaking which impact her profession that requires public speaking.”
Jensen and Plaza Dental Group have denied any wrongdoing. A trial is scheduled for March 9, 2026.
Court records show that in 2010 and 2011, Jensen was sued by four different patients for alleged medical malpractice. Each of the four cases was later dismissed with no public disclosure of any settlement agreement.
In 2019, Jensen and a colleague at Plaza Dental Group, Dr. Steffany Mohan, were sued for malpractice by a patient who alleged that Mohan performed dental implant work on her without disclosing that in 2016, the Iowa Dental Board alleged she failed to maintain a reasonably satisfactory standard of competency in the practice of dentistry and appeared to lack the clinical skills and knowledge for providing dental implants. The lawsuit was later settled out of court.
In 2024, a sixth malpractice lawsuit was filed against Jensen. In that case, a Polk County woman alleged Jensen performed a “total mouth extraction” of her teeth and placement of dental implants while failing to inform her that he had been barred from performing such work through a disciplinary order issued by the Iowa Dental Board.
The plaintiff in that case alleged she was left with “crooked implants and no teeth,” and that because none of her implants could be salvaged, she would need “full bone grafting of her jaw, from cadaver bone, and a sinus lift.” The case was dismissed by the plaintiff within hours of its filing, suggesting it may be refiled at some point.
Board sanctioned Jensen twice before
In addition to the six malpractice claims, Jensen was the subject of two disciplinary orders issued by the board before moving to Texas.
In October 2009, the board charged Jensen with failure to maintain a satisfactory standard of competency in the practice of dentistry. The board alleged it received a complaint concerning the quality of the care provided when Jensen performed “a full mouth reconstruction” for a patient.
The board said a consultant reviewed the care provided to the patient by Jensen and concluded he had failed to meet the expected standard of care, in part because he restored the patient’s teeth without proper evaluation and reassessment, and there were problems with both the dental impressions and crowns, all of which contributed to other issues such as facial and joint discomfort.
Jensen, the board alleged, “lacked the skill and judgment to properly treat this patient, which resulted in an overall failure of this case.”
After two years of continuances in the disciplinary case, Jensen and the board agreed to settle the matter in October 2011. Jensen agreed to pay a civil penalty of $5,000 and also agreed to restrict his practice by no longer performing major mouth reconstructions on patients.
In 2019, the board accused Jensen of violating the settlement agreement by again performing dental work that constituted a major reconstruction of a patient’s mouth.
Jensen was charged with failing to comply with the board's decision. The board then agreed to resolve the matter by issuing Jensen a warning and by restating its 2011 prohibition on mouth reconstruction.
This article was originally published in the Iowa Capital Dispatch and republished by DrBicuspid under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. The Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence.
Deputy Editor Clark Kauffman has worked during the past 30 years as both an investigative reporter and editorial writer at two of Iowa’s largest newspapers, the Des Moines Register and the Quad-City Times.
