Collecting research data from clinical practice: How can informatics help

摘要

Evidence-based dentistry challenges the dental profession to base more and more of its clinical care activities on solid data regarding patient diagnoses, treatment and outcomes. However, sys-tematic reviews in dentistry often suffer from a dearth of clinical studies. As a complement to large-scale, long-term clinical trials, many experts have advocated conducting clinical studies in dental practices. While this option presents some exciting possibilities and opportunities, it also faces significant chal-lenges. Research data collected in clinical practice can be highly useful in dental research, because they are gathered in the settings in which care is typically rendered. As such, they can provide a highly credible source for information to guide clinical practitioners. On the other hand, conducting clinical studies in private practices faces obstacles related to practitioner training, data standardization, regulatory com-pliance and study design. Recent informatics initiatives can support dental field studies through stand-ardization of data, a data collection and curation infrastructure, and quality assurance. In future years, informatics and health information technology is expected to play an increasing role in conducting field studies in dentistry.