The awareness and attitudes of students of one indian dental school toward information technology and its use to improve patient care.

BACKGROUND: Many obstacles need to be overcome if digital and electronic technologies are to be fully integrated in the operation of dental clinics in some countries. These obstacles may be physical, technical, or psychosocial barriers in the form of perceptions and attitudes related to software incompatibilities, patient privacy, and interference with the patient-practitioner relationship. The objectives of the study are to assess the perceptions of Indian dental students of one school toward the usefulness of digital technologies in improving dental practice; their willingness to use digital and electronic technologies; the perceived obstacles to the use of digital and electronic technologies in dental care setups; and their attitudes toward Internet privacy issues. METHODS: The study population consisted of 186 final year undergraduate dental students from the A. B. Shetty Memorial institute of Dental Sciences, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Mangalore, India. Survey data were analyzed descriptively . RESULTS: Most students indicated that information technology enhances patient satisfaction, the quality of dental record, diagnosis, treatment planning, and doctor-doctor communication. Cost of equipment and need for technical training were regarded as major obstacles by substantial proportions of respondents. DISCUSSION: Most dental students at our school feel that the information technology will support their decision making in diagnoses and devising effective treatment plans, which in turn increase patient satisfaction and quality of care. Students also perceived that lack of technical knowledge and the high cost of implementation are major barriers to developing information technology in India.

Qualities of dental chart recording and coding.

Chart recording and coding are the important processes in the healthcare informatics system, but there were only a few reports in the dentistry field. The objectives of this study are to study the qualities of dental chart recording and coding, as well as the achievement of lecture/workshop on this topic. The study was performed by auditing the patient's charts at the TU Dental Student Clinic from July 2011-August 2012. The chart recording mean scores ranged from 51.0-55.7%, whereas the errors in the coding process were presented in the coder part more than the doctor part. The lecture/workshop could improve the scores only in some topics.

Validity of an information and communication technology system for data capture in epidemiological studies.

The Belgian National Institute of Health Insurance is implementing an oral health data registration and surveillance system. This study aimed to develop and validate a system of electronic data capture for oral health surveys at a national level - Oral Survey-B - and to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the electronic system in comparison with the traditional handwritten data capture. Six series of full-mouth recordings simulating the clinical examination of 6 patients were set up in a Powerpoint presentation. The validation was undertaken by 52 general practitioners. A randomized one-period crossover design was used with two formats of data capture, i.e. electronic followed by handwritten or handwritten followed by electronic system. Further, 6 benchmarked handwritten forms were transferred to the electronic format. For the electronic data capture, 86.5% of the practitioners had a correct completion rate of ≥95%. The corresponding value for the handwritten data capture and transfer was 78.8% (p = 0.25, McNemar test). The overall accuracy of forms without any error was 73.4% for the electronic and 62.5% for the handwritten data capture (p < 0.001, signed-rank test). Significantly lower percentages of errors and less time were observed for the electronic data capture (p < 0.001, signed-rank test). Practitioners considered the electronic data capture as being much more difficult to carry out (p < 0.001). As information technology has turned into an ever more necessary working tool in epidemiology, there should be an important potential for uptake of further improvements in electronic data capture in the future.

Advancing oral medicine through informatics and information technology: a proposed framework and strategy.

The implementation of information technology in healthcare is a significant focus for many nations around the world. However, information technology support for clinical care, research and education in oral medicine is currently poorly developed. This situation hampers our ability to transform oral medicine into a 'learning healthcare discipline' in which the divide between clinical practice and research is diminished and, ultimately, eliminated. This paper reviews the needs of and requirements for information technology support of oral medicine and proposes an agenda designed to meet those needs. For oral medicine, this agenda includes analyzing and reviewing current clinical and documentation practices, working toward progressively standardizing clinical data, and helping define requirements for oral medicine systems. IT professionals can contribute by conducting baseline studies about the use of electronic systems, helping develop controlled vocabularies and ontologies, and designing, implementing, and evaluating novel systems centered on the needs of clinicians, researchers and educators. Successfully advancing IT support for oral medicine will require close coordination and collaboration among oral medicine professionals, information technology professionals, system vendors, and funding agencies. If current barriers and obstacles are overcome, practice and research in oral medicine stand ready to derive significant benefits from the application of information technology.

Evaluating the effectiveness of modeling principles for data models.

We evaluated the effectiveness of modeling principles intended to harmonize the information representation between terminology-ontology models and information models. Our study utilized dental clinical statements and sample dental record questions. We asked experts to define the equivalency (mapping) of these elements and measured their agreement. We modified the data elements and asked the experts to conduct subsequent mappings. We measured the agreement and compared the levels of agreement before and after changes, expecting that agreement would increase. The level of agreement (Kappa) before modeling was 0.3 to 0.4 and after was 0.5 (p<0.05). The difference was small but statistically significant. Our results suggest that the modeling principles improve information representation since agreement increased.

Developing a standardized cephalometric vocabulary: choices and possible strategies.

The science of cephalometry has been invaluable for guiding orthodontic diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcomes tracking. Though software packages easily calculate most cephalometric measurements, the ability to exchange cephalometric data between software packages is poorly developed. Hindering this effort is the lack of an agreed-upon standard for electronic exchange of cephalometric measurements. Unlike more technological issues, the problem of creating such a standard is one of formalizing decisions already established through historical precedent. Solving this problem will require education, cooperation, and consensus in order to reap the potential improvements to patient care, dental education, and research. The first step in overcoming these remaining issues is awareness. This article reviews those factors that place cephalometric measurements in an excellent position for standardization, outlines those decisions that must be made in order to realize the goal of electronic exchange of cephalometric information, and describes some of the options for these decisions as well as some advantages and disadvantages of each.

Nine years of DentEd--a global perspective on dental education.

This paper describes the three successive and successful DentEd projects, funded by the European Union, that established a productive thematic network which identified common content within the dental curriculum. It then developed an agreed professional profile, with a defined set of competences and a modular curriculum for all new dental graduates based on the European Credit Transfer System and trends in learning and assessment. The three phases took nine years to complete. Phase one investigated all aspects of dental undergraduate education and included over 30 visits to different dental schools by teams of dental educators. Phase two built on this work and included further visits to dental schools. Phase three refined the competency framework that had been developed in phase two and culminated in a global dental conference which finalised position papers on all aspects of dental education. The work and recommendations of the ICT in dental education group are considered in detail in the paper. The projects provided the stimulus for a number of European and international collaborations, including the web-based International Federation of Dental Education and Associations (IFDEA) Knowledge Centre and the International Virtual Dental School (IVIDENT), both of which aim to make increasingly sophisticated ICT-based educational material available worldwide and to promote international understanding.

Solving incompatibilities between electronic records for orthodontic patients.

Today, orthodontists should not need to burden their work load with tasks such as figuring out how to send patient information to colleagues or how to share the same patient record across different software programs. In a long-term attempt to lighten these tasks, we are developing a standard for electronic orthodontic patient records to enable a seamless interchange of data between software programs. This article describes a practical proposal that integrates 2 existing standards, HL7 and DICOM, to create a standard for electronic orthodontic patient records.

ADA initiates development of orthodontic informatics standards.

Standards are the key to interoperability across systems. The American Dental Association (ADA) has been accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standards-developing organization. The ADA sponsors standards programs for all areas of dentistry, including dental materials and products and dental informatics. ANSI/ADA Specification No. 1000, Standard Clinical Data Architecture for the Structure and Content of an Electronic Health Record, is the first ANSI standard that defines the fundamental data structures used to make patient health records. The standard promotes the sharing of like data between dentists, physicians, and hospitals.