Dental Informatics: A Work in Progress

Abstract

Dental informatics is a young scientific discipline that is undergoing continual maturation. Its literature is estimated to consist of approximately 600 papers published between 1975 and 2003, and it is currently growing at a rate of about 50 papers annually. While interest in the discipline is growing, the number of core contributors to dental informatics research remains relatively small. Two major questions for the discipline are: What are the research challenges that dental informatics faces today? and How can the discipline be strengthened and positioned to maximize its success in addressing those challenges? Progress toward research challenges formulated more than ten years ago has been varied. While many new technologies have become available for clinical dental practice, research, and education, many fundamental problems remain to be addressed with informatics research. Recommendations to augment the research capacity in dental informatics include creating a stronger worldwide dental informatics research community, drawing more biomedical informatics researchers to dental research areas, providing career opportunities for dental informatics researchers, addressing grand challenges together as a community, and recruiting subsequent generations of dental informaticians.

Health-oriented electronic oral health record: Development and evaluation

“…Work on the EOHR is a particular aspect of Dental Informatics. Schleyer 20 discussed this term and its relationship to related terms such as information science and technology. Just as the interrelated biological concepts comprising healthcare are intrinsically complex, so is the relationship among various data items in the EOHR.…”

A Guiding Framework for Ontology Reuse in the Biomedical Domain

“…In fact, healthcare in general, remains as one area where information exchange has been severely limited. As stated in [4], "aside from a few implementations in closed care delivery systems...there are no systems that demonstrate the free interchange of patient information among a multitude of healthcare providers…at multiple locations". Therefore, one way to address the chasm between the medical and oral health domains is with a cross-domain ontology of medical and oral health terms, which is extended with domain knowledge rules to form a scientific knowledge base that can be reused in expert systems to aid in the decision making process of both medical and dental practitioners.…”

Factors in the development of clinical informatics competence in early career health sciences professionals in Australia: a qualitative study

“…Examples include allied health (Williamson et al 2005), dentistry (Schleyer 2003), medicine (Blumenthal et al 2005), nursing (Smedley 2005) and social work (Parker-Oliver and Demiris 2008). Most of this literature emanates from separate professions.…”