Dental Clinical Data For Research? A Pilot Data Mapping Study

Objective: A recent study found the majority of dental offices (74%) in dental-practice-based-research networks (PBRN) used electronic-dental-records (EDRs) for management of patient information. Yet, PBRN have not used data from EDRs to any significant degree in their studies. The objective of this study is to investigate to what degree the EDR data can be used for practice-based research. More specifically, we want to know which clinical data have been most frequently used in PBRN studies. Among them, how many can be found in a comprehensive dental-information-model (DIM) that we developed early, as well as in a major EDR system – Dentrix.

Method: Common-Data-Elements (CDEs) from Cancer-Data-Standard Registry and Repository is a comprehensive data repository that NIDCR used to annotate PBRN studies. At the time of this study, there were 2478 CDEs (including non-dental information items) used for PBRN studies.  A CDE specialist manually mapped the DIM and the Dentrix data items (DIs) to the list of PBRN CDEs, respectively. The mapping results were categorized into three groups: complete, partial, and no match. A dental-domain expert performed validations manually and calculated the accuracies of the mapping results. In addition, we identified the most frequently used CDEs in PBRN studies.

Result: With PBRN CDEs, DIM’s DIs had 40% (404) of complete match, 7% (70) of partial match, and 53% (530) of no match.  Dentrix’s DIs had 37% (44) of complete match, 2.5% (3) of partial match, and 60% (71) of no match. The average accuracy of mapping is 86%.

Conclusion: A significant number of DIs (approximately 40%) in EDRs or DIM are mapped directly to the PBRN  CDEs.  It is potentially feasible to utilize and reuse this clinically relevant EDR data for PBRN studies pending further research with collaborative effort between clinicians and researchers on mechanism of accessing and sharing these data.