The dental informatics online community

Dental Informatics (DI) is the application of computer and information science to improve dental practice, research, education, and program administration. To support the growth of this emerging discipline, we created the Dental Informatics Online Community (DIOC). The DIOC provides a dedicated professional home for DI researchers and serves as an open, common, and worldwide forum for all individuals interested in the field. It was created and is maintained by the Center for Dental Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, independent from any professional association, corporate interest or funding source. The DIOC's Website provides many useful features, such as a learning center, publication archive, member and project directories, and the Current Awareness Service (CAS). The CAS automatically notifies members about new information added to the Community. Notifications are individualized according to a member's profile and activities on the site. The DIOC is a research-oriented online community which provides resources in the dental informatics and dental technology field, as well as a way to establish social connections to share ideas, problems and research opportunities. Member and activity growth since the community's inception in 2005 have been steady, but future sustainability of the community depends on many factors

Costs of Health IT: Beginning to Understand the Financial Impact of a Dental School EHR

Health Information Technology (Health IT) constitutes an integral component of the operations of most academic dental institutions nowadays. However, the expenses associated with the acquisition and the ongoing maintenance of these complex systems have often been buried among costs for other electronic infrastructure systems, distributed across various cost centers including unmeasured central campus support, covered centrally and therefore difficult to quantify, and spread over years, denying school administrators a clear understanding of the resources that have been dedicated to Health IT. The aim of this study was to understand the financial impact of Health IT at four similar U.S. dental schools: two schools using a purchased Electronic Health Record (EHR), and two schools that developed their own EHR. For these schools, the costs of creating ($2.5 million) and sustaining ($174,000) custom EHR software were significantly higher than acquiring ($500,000) and sustaining ($121,000) purchased software. These results are based on historical data and should not be regarded as a gold standard for what a complete Health IT suite should cost. The presented data are intended to inform school administrators about the myriad of costs associated with Health IT and give them a point of reference when comparing costs or making estimates for implementation projects

Social Media in the Dental School Environment, Part B: Curricular Considerations

The goal of this article is to describe the broad curricular constructs surrounding teaching and learning about social media in dental education. This analysis takes into account timing, development, and assessment of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors needed to effectively use social media tools as a contemporary dentist. Three developmental stages in a student’s path to becoming a competent professional are described: from undergraduate to dental student, from the classroom and preclinical simulation laboratory to the clinical setting, and from dental student to licensed practitioner. Considerations for developing the dental curriculum and suggestions for effective instruction at each stage are offered. In all three stages in the future dentist’s evolution, faculty members need to educate students about appropriate professional uses of social media. Faculty members should provide instruction on the beneficial aspects of this communication medium and help students recognize the potential pitfalls associated with its use. The authors provide guidelines for customizing instruction to complement each stage of development, recognizing that careful timing is not only important for optimal learning but can prevent inappropriate use of social media as students are introduced to novel situations

Social Media in the Dental School Environment, Part A: Benefits, Challenges, and Recommendations for Use

Social media consist of powerful tools that impact not only communication but relationships among people, thus posing an inherent challenge to the traditional standards of who we are as dental educators and what we can expect of each other. This article examines how the world of social media has changed dental education. Its goal is to outline the complex issues that social media use presents for academic dental institutions and to examine these issues from personal, professional, and legal perspectives. After providing an update on social media, the article considers the advantages and risks associated with the use of social media at the interpersonal, professional, and institutional levels. Policies and legal issues of which academic dental institutions need to be aware from a compliance perspective are examined, along with considerations and resources needed to develop effective social media policies. The challenge facing dental educators is how to capitalize on the benefits that social media offer, while minimizing risks and complying with the various forms of legal constraint

How information systems should support the information needs of general dentists in clinical settings: suggestions from a qualitative study

Background. A major challenge in designing useful clinical information systems in dentistry is to incorporate clinical evidence based on dentists' information needs and then integrate the system seamlessly into the complex clinical workflow. However, little is known about the actual information needs of dentists during treatment sessions. The purpose of this study is to identify general dentists' information needs and the information sources they use to meet those needs in clinical settings so as to inform the design of dental information systems. Methods. A semi-structured interview was conducted with a convenience sample of 18 general dentists in the Pittsburgh area during clinical hours. One hundred and five patient cases were reported by these dentists. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using thematic analysis with a constant comparative method to identify categories and themes regarding information needs and information source use patterns. Results. Two top-level categories of information needs were identified: foreground and background information needs. To meet these needs, dentists used four types of information sources: clinical information/tasks, administrative tasks, patient education and professional development. Major themes of dentists' unmet information needs include: (1) timely access to information on various subjects; (2) better visual representations of dental problems; (3) access to patient-specific evidence-based information; and (4) accurate, complete and consistent documentation of patient records. Resource use patterns include: (1) dentists' information needs matched information source use; (2) little use of electronic sources took place during treatment; (3) source use depended on the nature and complexity of the dental problems; and (4) dentists routinely practiced cross-referencing to verify patient information. Conclusions. Dentists have various information needs at the point of care. Among them, the needs for better visual representation and patient-specific evidence-based information are mostly unmet. While patient records and support staff remain the most used information sources, electronic sources other than electronic dental records (EDR) are rarely utilized during patient visits. For future development of dental information or clinical decision-support systems, developers should consider integrating high-quality, up-to-date clinical evidence into comprehensive and easily accessible EDRs as well as supporting dentists' resource use patterns as identified in the study. © 2010 Song et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Cost Comparison of an On‐Premise IT Solution with a Cloud‐Based Solution for Electronic Health Records in a Dental School Clinic

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153728/1/jddjde019089.pd

Use of Lecture Recordings in Dental Education: Assessment of Status Quo and Recommendations

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153739/1/jddj0022033720137711tb05619x.pd

Preprocessing messages posted by dentists to an Internet mailing list: a report of methods developed for a study of clinical content

Objectives: Mining social media artifacts requires substantial processing before content analyses. In this report, we describe our procedures for preprocessing 14,576 e-mail messages sent to a mailing list of several hundred dental professionals. Our goal was to transform the messages into a format useful for natural language processing (NLP) to enable subsequent discovery of clinical topics expressed in the corpus. Methods: Preprocessing involved message capture, database creation and import, extraction of multipurpose Internet mail extensions, decoding of encoded text, de-identification, and cleaning. We also developed a Web-based tool to identify signals for noisy strings and sections, and to verify the effectiveness of customized noise filters. We tailored our cleaning strategies to delete text and images that would impede NLP and in-depth content analyses. Before applying the full set of filters to each message, we determined an effective filter order. Results: Preprocessing messages improved effectiveness of NLP by 38%. Sources of noise included personal information in the salutation, the farewell, and the signature block; names and places mentioned in the body of the text; threads with quoted text; advertisements; embedded or attached images; spam- and virus-scanning notifications; auto text parts; e-mail addresses; and Web links. We identified 53 patterns of noise and delivered a set of de-identified and cleaned messages to the NLP analyst. Conclusion: Preprocessing electronic messages can markedly improve subsequent NLP to enable discovery of clinical topics. Keywords: Electronic mail; data processing; natural language processing; dental informatic

BigMouth : development and maintenance of a successful dental data repository

DATA AVAILABILITY : The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.Few clinical datasets exist in dentistry to conduct secondary research. Hence, a novel dental data repository called BigMouth was developed, which has grown to include 11 academic institutions contributing Electronic Health Record data on over 4.5 million patients. The primary purpose for BigMouth is to serve as a high-quality resource for rapidly conducting oral health-related research. BigMouth allows for assessing the oral health status of a diverse US patient population; provides rationale and evidence for new oral health care delivery modes; and embraces the specific oral health research education mission. A data governance framework that encouraged data sharing while controlling contributed data was initially developed. This transformed over time into a mature framework, including a fee schedule for data requests and allowing access to researchers from noncontributing institutions. Adoption of BigMouth helps to foster new collaborations between clinical, epidemiological, statistical, and informatics experts and provides an additional venue for professional development.The National Library of Medicine.https://academic.oup.com/jamiaam2023Dental Management Science

Adrenal tropism of SARS-CoV-2 and adrenal findings in a post-mortem case series of patients with severe fatal COVID-19

Progressive respiratory failure and hyperinflammatory response is the primary cause of death in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite mounting evidence of disruption of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis in COVID-19, relatively little is known about the tropism of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to adrenal glands and associated changes. Here we demonstrate adrenal viral tropism and replication in COVID-19 patients. Adrenal glands showed inflammation accompanied by inflammatory cell death. Histopathologic analysis revealed widespread microthrombosis and severe adrenal injury. In addition, activation of the glycerophospholipid metabolism and reduction of cortisone intensities were characteristic for COVID-19 specimens. In conclusion, our autopsy series suggests that SARS-CoV-2 facilitates the induction of adrenalitis. Given the central role of adrenal glands in immunoregulation and taking into account the significant adrenal injury observed, monitoring of developing adrenal insufficiency might be essential in acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and during recovery.</p