Dental Informatics - the next big thing?

[PegaNinguem]

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Hello everyone... I'm currently a 3rd year dental student at Columbia. I have a background in computing and was thinking about returning to information sciences after graduating from dental school.

If anyone out there has a similar interest as me, feel free to contribute any ideas or comments.

I know that dental clinics in hospitals around the country are making the move to electronic records. Columbia Presbyterian has not gone digital yet, and I was wondering from those of you who attend a dental school that operates digitally how the experience is. I ask because I can tell you a hundred reasons that paper charts are a pain in the butt, but for those who started in a school that is electronic, I'd be very interested to know the limitations (and successes if you want to go into more detail) of the electronic health care records that you use.

On a similar thread, how integrated are the electronic health records to the patients' greater health record? This is a question more relevant in multi-disciplinary clinics that are out there. How well does the integration function in patients' overall treatments? What about billing, insurance?

Also, for small practice management, do any of you think that the move to national health care / managed health care (HMOs, PPOs) is going to require an overhaul of practice management software? Does anyone have any ideas on the matter?

I'd love to be able to get together a group of dental students interested in working in the field of dental informatics to wax poetic and exchange ideas and information. If you're interested, feel free to respond publicly or privately.

Peace!

 

[armorshell]

One of my PI's interest is in data mining paperless charting systems for information valuable in clinical research, so there's definitely some interest out there.

I don't foresee myself having time to work on such a project anytime in the near future but I'm certainly willing to wax poetic about it.

 

[Cold Front]

Wasn't microsoft pushing something similar to this in the healthcare industry? The Amalga project.

from wiki...

Microsoft Amalga (formerly known as Azyxxi) is a unified health enterprise platform designed to retrieve and display patient information from many sources, including scanned documents, electrocardiograms, X-rays, MRI scans and other medical imaging procedures, lab results, dictated reports of surgery, as well as patient demographics and contact information. It was developed by doctors and researchers at the Washington Hospital Center emergency department in 1996, and in 2006 it was acquired by the Microsoft Health Solutions Group, as part of a plan to enter the fast-growing market for health care information technology. It has since been adopted at a number of leading hospitals and health systems across the country including Johns Hopkins Hospital, St Joseph Health System, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Georgetown University Hospital and five other hospitals in the MedStar Health group, a nonprofit network in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area.

Amalga can be used to tie together many unrelated medical systems using a wide variety of data types in order to provide an immediate, updated composite portrait of the patient's healthcare history. All of Amalga's components are integrated using middleware software that allows the creation of standard approaches and tools to interface with the many software and hardware systems found in hospitals. A physician using Amalga can obtain within seconds a patient's past and present hospital records, medication and allergy lists, lab studies, and views of relevant X-rays, CT Scans, and other clips and images, all organized into one customized format to highlight the most critical information for that user. In clinical use since 1996, Amalga has the ability to manage more than 40 terabytes of data and provide real-time access to more than 12,000 data elements associated with a given patient.

The system was first implemented by the Washington Hospital Center emergency department to reduce average waiting times. Since then it has also been used by the District of Columbia Department of Health for management of such mass-casualty incidents as a bioterrorism attack and in a variety of other settings in Arizona, Maryland and Virginia. The Cleveland Clinic recently installed the system in a pilot project as an imaging and data integration system. Besides clinical data, Amalga is also designed to collect financial and operational data for hospital administrators.

Amalga currently runs on Microsoft Windows Server operating system and uses SQL Server 2005 as the data store.

 

[schwing]

http://ada.org/prof/resources/pubs/adanews/adanewsarticle.asp?articleid=3302