The portal is secure.tmhp.com — but only for adults. Texas runs its Medicaid dental benefit as two different systems depending on the patient's age. Adult dental is fee-for-service through the Texas Medicaid & Healthcare Partnership (TMHP). Children's dental, under Texas Health Steps and CHIP Dental, is carved out to three separate dental plans, and the plan the child is enrolled in decides where you verify and where you bill.
The age split is the fact offices keep missing
There is no single Texas Medicaid dental portal, and looking for one is how an afternoon disappears. Two questions have to be answered in order, and the second only exists for children:
- Is the patient an adult or a child? Adult, and you are on TMHP, fee-for-service. Child, and TMHP is the wrong door for the dental claim.
- If a child, which dental plan? The three children's dental plans are DentaQuest, MCNA and UnitedHealthcare. Each has its own provider portal, its own credentials and its own network status for your practice.
That second question matters more than it looks. Being contracted with one children's dental plan says nothing about the other two — an office can be in-network for one Texas child and out for the next one who walks in, on the same programme, in the same chair.
Your TMHP login is moving, and the window is short
TMHP is migrating to IAMOnline, phased through 2026: single sign-on, mandatory multi-factor authentication, and a seven-day activation window after which access is lost. This is the part worth diarising rather than discovering. A migration email that sits unread in a shared front-desk inbox for a week costs the practice its TMHP access, and getting it back is a re-enrolment problem rather than a password-reset one.
Give the TMHP account an owner by name, not "the office", and make sure the address on the account is one somebody actually opens daily.
Where you actually log in
| What | Address | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| TMHP — adult fee-for-service, eligibility and claims | secure.tmhp.com | 10 September 2026 |
| MCNA — children's dental plan | portal.mcna.net | 10 September 2026 |
| DentaQuest — children's dental plan | provideraccess.dentaquest.com | 10 September 2026 |
| UnitedHealthcare — children's dental plan | address not established — ring the plan | 10 September 2026 |
The check was a Domain Name System lookup on 10 September 2026, and that is the whole of it. secure.tmhp.com returned a single address (168.44.238.51). portal.mcna.net resolved through an Amazon load-balancer name to three addresses. provideraccess.dentaquest.com resolved through an Akamai chain to two. We did not sign in and we make no claim about whether any of them was reachable from a particular network — several state and plan portals refuse traffic that does not look like an ordinary browser, so a failure from somewhere else says nothing.
The UnitedHealthcare row is deliberately blank. The third children's dental plan is real, but a login address for it is not established here, and a guessed hostname on a page whose only value is that somebody checked it would be worse than the gap. Ring the plan and write down what they give you.
What to do
- Ask the patient's age before you ask for the card. It decides which of the two Texas systems you are in.
- For adults, bookmark secure.tmhp.com and reach it from the bookmark rather than a search result.
- For children, record the dental plan against the patient, not "Texas Medicaid" — a note filed under the programme sends the next person to the wrong portal.
- Check your network status with each children's dental plan separately. Three contracts, three answers.
- Name an owner for the TMHP account before the IAMOnline cutover and treat the seven-day activation window as a hard deadline.
- Call UnitedHealthcare for its dental provider portal address rather than typing something that looks plausible.
The state-by-state directory has the same answer for 48 states and the District of Columbia, each hostname re-checked in DNS on the same date.
Portal addresses and plan split last re-checked 10 September 2026.