Coronavirus Disease 2019: Prevention and Safety in the Dental Office

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by a single stranded RNA virus originating from Wuhan China has gripped the whole world and evolved rapidly into a public health crisis. SARSCoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is abundantly present in nasopharyngeal and salivary secretions of affected patients and is transmitted by droplets, surface contact, fecal-oral route and by aerosolization during procedures. The dental professionals are particularly at risk because of close contact with the patient and exposure to blood, saliva and droplets. Dental professionals must be fully aware of coronavirus spreading modalities, identification of patients with this infection, so present article introduces the essential knowledge about COVID-19 infection and provide recommended management protocols for dental practitioners based on relevant guidelines, research so that dental professional are better prepared to manage  asymptomatic, suspected, and confirmed COVID-19 patients

Essays on impact of information technology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references.The five essays in this dissertation look at how specific information technologies (such as Electronic Document Management (EDM), Semantic Web and RuleML) and IT in general can be used to automate and standardize data and processes, enable faster and more accurate information flow, and improve individual as well as firm performance. The first essay is an analytical review-type study in which we provide a comprehensive survey of research literature about different complementary organizational assets that when coupled with IT can lead to higher firm performance. In the second essay, we study the causal effects of digitizing work on information workers' time- use and performance at a large insurance firm. We make causal inferences and obtain unbiased estimates by exploiting a quasi-experiment: the phased introduction of Electronic Document Management (EDM) across multiple offices at different dates. In addition to large changes in time-use and performance, we find that digitization leads to a decline in the substitutable routine labor input and an increase in complementary non-routine cognitive labor input at the information worker level. We also uncover a new micro-level mechanism, "IT-enabled slack", that explains how exactly IT can lead to payoff in terms of information worker productivity. In the third essay, we examine the IT productivity relationship using a large primary source firm-level dataset about IT investments that spans the 2003-2005 period. Given results from previous studies, we present evidence of an inverted U-shaped returns curve, with returns now close to what they were in pre-Internet era. The fourth essay explores what high-performing firms specifically do to gain the greatest benefits from their IT investments.(cont.) Through a set of matched interviews with multiple respondents at 138 firms, we find that data/process standardization and systems integration, level of application integration and several IT-specific cultural elements are positively correlated with IT impact on customer satisfaction. The fifth essay shows the first detailed realistic e-business application scenario that exploits capabilities of the SweetRules V2.1 toolset for e-contracting using the SweetDeal approach. SweetRules is a powerful integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies. SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts.by Sumit Milap Bhansali.Ph.D

Exemplifying Business Opportunities for Improving Data Quality From Corporate Household Research

Corporate household (CHH) refers to the organizational information about the structure within the corporation and a variety of inter-organizational relationships. Knowledge derived from this data is becoming increasingly important for improving data quality in applications, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), risk management, and sales and market promotion. Extending the concepts from our previous CHH research, we exemplify in this paper the importance of improved corporate household knowledge and processing in various business application areas. Additionally, we provide examples of CHH business rules that are often implicit and fragmented - understood and practiced by different domain experts across functional areas of the firm. This paper is intended to form a foundation for further research to systematically investigate, capture, and build a body of corporate householding knowledge across diverse business applications

Retentive Aids in Maxillofacial Prosthodontics - A Review.

Retention has always been a problem in prosthodontics. Prosthodontists have always been struggling with retention in a maxillofacial prosthesis . Increased retention improves comfort as well as the confidence in the patient while wearing a facial prosthesis at work and in social settings. Advances in techniques used for retention of maxillofacial prosthesis and the materials used have been remarkable in the past several years. The journey from using metal bands to using adhesives to placing implants for retaining a maxillofacial prosthesis has been fascinating and satisfying to many, but, the aim of achieving the full potential still remains incomplete. &nbsp