?The overall goal of this STTR project is to reduce oral health disparities in both outcomes and care by enhancing the effectiveness of Community Health Clinics (CHCs) dental providers. To accomplish this goal, the project will create an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that allows them to effectively characterize and manage the oral health of their constituent populations and share health information with other EHRs. The EHR will incorporate the Dental Diagnostic System (DDS), a well-established standardized terminology for oral diagnoses that greatly improves the capture, storage, sharing, retrieval, and aggregation of oral health data by different professionals across specialties and sites of care. It will also incorporate a robust Health Information Exchange (HIE) functionality that will allow CHC providers to share information among their various EHR and practice management systems and with community-based outreach programs. This Phase I of the STTR research project will determine the feasibility of developing a commercial product that incorporates the DDS terminology and health information exchange functionality into a scalable EHR based on the existing Dental Data Manager (DDM), an EHR-like system developed by Oral Health Solutions targeting public oral health providers. Scalability will allow the product to meet the specific needs of the various technology environments found in CHCs today. The primary configuration will be a standalone EHR that includes the DDS and HIE functionality. Phase 1 will research the feasibility of two other configurations: 1) a HIE hub supplementing existing EHRs and 2) a diagnostic terminology support system for existing EHRs. In order to accomplish this goal, OHS will determine: The current Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology in the CHC safety net today The Health Information Exchange standards and protocols used by the current CHC EHRs Specific EHR User Interface optimizations that will facilitate the use of dental diagnostic terminology The cost and time perspective of developing the proposed commercial product With established feasibility, the information determined in this Phase I of the STTR will be used to create the specification for a commercial software product, the Dental Data Manager EHR, to be built in Phase 2.
Public Health Relevance Statement: Public Health Relevance: Community health centers (CHCs) are a critical component of the oral health care safety net, providing care to the poorest and most vulnerable patients. As the Affordable Care Act brings millions of new patients into the safety net, CHCs need more and better tools to help manage this growing population. The proposed Electronic Health Record (EHR) system to be created in this project is such a tool, allowing CHCs to effectively characterize and manage the oral health of their constituent populations.
NIH Spending Category: Clinical Research; Dental/Oral and Craniofacial Disease; Health Services; Networking and Information Technology R&D; Patient Safety
Project Terms: American Dental Association; base; Caring; Clinic; clinical practice; Code; Communities; Community Health; Community Health Centers; Computer software; cost; Data; data management; Dental; Dental Clinics; Dental Schools; design; Development; Diagnostic; Effectiveness; Electronic Health Record; Electronics; Environment; Evaluation; Foundations; Funding; Goals; Health; health data; health disparity; Health Information System; Health Personnel; Healthcare; heuristics; improved; International Classification of Diseases; International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD-10); Maps; Measures; medical specialties; Medicine; meetings; Methods; Oral Diagnosis; Oral health; Outcome; outreach program; Patients; Phase; Population; Practice Management; Production; Protocols documentation; Provider; public health medicine (field); public health relevance; Research; Research Infrastructure; Research Project Grants; Retrieval; safety net; Site; Small Business Technology Transfer Research; software development; Solid; Solutions; Specific qualifier value; Specificity; Staging; Support System; System; Technology; Terminology; Time; tool; United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; usability
