A Learning Health System (LHS) is one in which patients and clinicians work together to choose care based on best evidence, and to drive discovery as a natural outgrowth of every clinical encounter in order to ensure the right care to the right patient at the right time.
Our mission at the TCOHQS is to improve health by implementing a person-centered learning health system to ensure everyone receives safe, effective, and appropriate oral healthcare.
We are improving oral health by using Big Data and analytics to continuously evaluate dental care and create better patient outcomes. The center develops innovative learning health systems where informatics tools help dental providers capture patient data that researchers and computer programs analyze to improve care. The improvement process is ongoing, with patient care informing research, and research advancing patient care.
Focus Areas:
- Learning Health System for Dentistry
- Improving Quality of Care for Individuals and Populations
Grant Funding
Despite our tremendous investment in oral health, we have an untapped opportunity to improve the quality of care and prevent accidental harm to patients caused by routine dental care.
Learning Health System Informatics Infrastructure
- BigMouth Dental Data Repository: our researchers have developed a multi-institutional database containing data on over 3 million patients from dental EHR systems
- Dental Diagnostic System (DDS): our researchers developed and implemented a standardized language to describe oral health diagnosis, implemented in the EHR and allow the tracking of patient outcomes
Patient Safety
- Our researchers developed a Patient Safety Toolkit to allow dental organizations to efficiency mine EHR data to identify and classify adverse events
- Conducted large scale chart reviews and determined incidence of Adverse Events in dental offices
- Assessed Safety Culture at 4 Large Dental Institutions and identified areas for improvement
- Awarded an AHRQ Patient Safety Learning Lab grant to use systems engineering principles to improve dental safety
Quality Improvement and Population Health
- Implementing and validated 10 dental quality measures to assess performance across dental institutions
- Used BigMouth and EHR data to efficiently collect quality measures, assess the relationship between these measures and longitudinal outcomes, and assess measures across sites.
- Our teams develop interactive dashboards with actionable information to drive quality improvements
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Burnout, Work Engagement and Errors
- Burnout and Work Engagement Among US Dentists
- Diagnostic Errors/ Clinical Dental Faculty Members' Perceptions of Diagnostic Errors and How to Avoid Them
- Burnout II "Burnout Engagement and Dental Errors Among US Dentists"
- Conference Report/ Dental Providers' Perspectives on Diagnosis-Driven Dentistry: Strategies to Enhance Adoption of Dental Diagnostic Terminology
- Dental Data Repository
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Dental Quality e-Measures
- First pilot set of DQM measures/ Measuring Up: Implementing a Dental Quality Measure in the Electronic Health Record Context
- Parsimony/Quality measures everywhere: The case for parsimony
- DQM 1: Diabetes Measure/ Evaluating quality of dental care among diabetics: adaptation and testing of a dental quality measure in the electronic health records
- DQM 2: Sealant/ Assessing Validity of Existing Dental Sealant Quality Measures
- Number of Pregnant Women at the Dentist and the Care They Receive: A Dental Quality eMeasure Evaluation"
- Unintended consequences and challenges of quality measurements in dentistry
- Tobacco Screening and Cessation Efforts by Dental Providers: a quality measure evaluation.
- Measuring Sealant placement in children at the dental practice level
- Sealant measure 2: Increasing Value, Reducing Waste: Tailoring the Application of Dental Sealants According to Individual Caries Risk in Journal of Public Health Dentistry
- DQM 7: Perio Risk Paper - Measure the proportion of patients for which comprehensive periodontal charting, periodontal disease risk factors (diabetes status, tobacco use, and oral home care compliance), and periodontal diagnoses were documented in the electronic health record (EHR).
- Assessing the completeness of periodontal disease documentation in the EHR: a first step in measuring the quality of care
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Developing, Implementing and Assessing a Dental Diagnostic Terminology
- The Development of a Dental Diagnostic Terminology
- Evaluating a Dental Diagnostic Terminology in an Electronic Health Record
- The importance of using diagnostic codes
- Treatment Planning in Dentistry using an EHR implications for undergraduate education
- Assessing the use of a standardized dental diagnostic terminology in an electronic health record
- Impact of using an EHR with the DDS terminology on the critical thinking skills of dental students
- Dental Clinical Research: An Illustration of the Value of Diagnostic Terms
- Utilization and Validity of the Dental Diagnostic System Over Time in Academic and Private Practice.
- Providers perspective on DxTM
- Attitudes and beliefs toward the use of a dental diagnostic terminology
- Strategic Shift to a Diagnostic Model of Care in a Multi-Site Group Dental Practice
- Dental Technology Adoption/ Adoption of dental innovations: The case of a standardized dental diagnostic terminology
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Informatics
- Detection and characterization of usability problems in structured data entry interfaces in dentistry
- Are Three Methods Better Than One? A Comparative Assessment of Usability Evaluation Methods in an HER
- Cognitive Informatics – dental terminology/ Applying HCI Principles in Designing Usable Systems for Dentistry in Cognitive Informatics for Biomedicine Human Computer Interaction in Healthcare
- What is considered part of the dental health record survey/Honoring Patients’ Privacy Rule Right of Access in the Context of Electronic Health Records
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Patient Safety
- From Good to Better: Towards a Patient Safety Initiative in Dentistry.
- An adverse event trigger tool in dentistry/ An adverse event trigger tool in dentistry: A new methodology for measuring harm in the dental office
- Case Reports Hailed
- Classifying Harm resulting from Dental Adverse Events/ Classifying Adverse Events in the Dental Office
- Open Wide: Looking into the Safety Culture of the Dental School/ Looking into the Safety Culture of the Dental Practice
- The Dangers of Dental Devices as reported in the FDA MAUDE Database
- AEs documented in literature/ Lessons learned from Dental Patient Safety Case Reports
- How dental team members describe adverse events
- Quantifying Dental-Office Originating Adverse Events: The Dental Practice Study Methods
- Other Publications