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BackgroundOral self-care plays an important role in maintaining oral health and preventing the occurrence of oral diseases. The association between good oral care and good oral hygiene is well known. However, the adherence to a proper daily oral hygiene regimen generally remains poor, so the prevalence of oral diseases remains high. Periodontal disease is the most common oral disease in the population. To enhance the adherence to good oral hygiene behaviors for patients with periodontal disease, we developed a personalized and evidence-based mobile application as an intervention tool for the purpose of initiating and improving good oral self-care.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to demonstrate the systematic development process and content of the oral self-care mobile application, OSCA.MethodsThe systematic development process of OSCA consists of three phases: behavioral diagnosis, intervention design, and assessment of OSCA. Firstly, behavioral problem of oral self-care was identified by the experts in periodontics care. Secondly, the intervention functions and the mode of delivery were designed based on the capability-opportunity-motivation behavioral model, which is the underpinning model behind the behavior change wheel framework. Thirdly, the developed app was evaluated by the experts through a heuristics evaluation checklist by adopting Morville’s Honeycomb model, and the final version of OSCA was assessed by the patients with periodontal disease using the System Usability Scale (SUS).ResultsThe problems of target behavior were identified and incorporated into the design of intervention functions. For the beta version of the OSCA, experts proposed four main suggestions to improve the usefulness. Experts evaluated the beta and final versions of the app using a heuristics evaluation checklist, providing mean scores of 4.38 and 4.62, respectively. For usability testing, 87 participants completed both the specified tasks and the SUS questionnaire, providing an SUS median score of 77.5 (IQR = 12.5) and an overall mean completion time of 12.22 minutes for the specified tasks. The mean scores of the intervention functions for capability establishment, motivation enhancement, and opportunity creation were 6.13, 5.88, and 6.06, respectively.ConclusionsThe study presents a rigorous design process of developing an evidence-based and personalized mobile application for oral self-care. The results of the expert evaluation confirmed the validated design and the participants were satisfied with the designed app.

Quality of medical services is even more critical than ever in a highly competitive health care industry. Long waiting time is a major source of patient dissatisfaction, thus, the issue of how to reduce waiting time to improve service quality is very important. A well-designed appointment scheduling system can effectively shorten the patient waiting time and enhance their satisfaction. This study aims to propose a framework for individualized outpatient appointment scheduling (OAS) in a dental clinic which composed of one attending dentist and two resident dentists. To design the OAS, firstly, the prediction model of the treatment duration of an individual patient was established by using artificial neural network. Secondly, discrete event simulation method was used to develop the simulation model which simulates the operations of the studied dental clinic. Finally, the established simulation model was used to evaluate the performance of the appointment scheduling. The proposed model consists of numbers of main features: 1) the service providers composed of multiple dentists with different professional competence levels; 2) there are two types of patients (return and not-return patients); 3) patient no-shows was considered; and 4) a variety of medical treatments (requiring different treatment time) are provided to the patients. The results of the study show that the proposed OAS can effectively improve the service performance of the dental clinic, this could be caused by patient's characteristics were taken into consideration of building an appropriated appointment interval.