Conclusion

As described in this paper, dental informatics is important in many ways to clinical practice.  Since the number of computer systems and the frequency of their use increase constantly in a dental environment, it is getting more difficult to distinguish between basic and special purpose needs.  Along the path of a dental patient entering and leaving the dental office, we have shown existing hardware solutions as well as software packages and identified current developments in diagnostics and treatment modalities.  New systems can be purchased almost on a daily basis and only budgetary considerations limit the number of stand-alone systems in a dental office.  The worst case could be that none of these systems can exchange any data or images.  Challenges for the next few years for software developers will be to make sure that their system can 'talk' to another as well as issues of portability.  The usefulness of their products in the newly evolving digital dental office will decide on recognition.  Dental professionals, on the other hand, need to accept that purchasing alone is not a final step.  Increased readiness to get training on the new system and purchasing costly solutions as teams of three and more dentists are major challenges to reach the break-even point of investment earlier.  Here, dental informatics can help to find the right way to a digital clinical practice.  However, significant efforts and investments are needed to transform theories and concepts into real-world solutions to improve dental practice.  The ADA's coordination with other disciplines in the healthcare informatics activities ensures compatibility of the oral health and general health information domains; this coordination will help the dentist to be one of the earliest beneficiaries of interoperable systems and enterprise architectures that have a Life Cycle perspective.  This perspective will greatly help achieve the economic benefits of the information architecture.

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Citation Number: Vol. 3, No. 1, Page 040