Overview

Dental informatics specialists look for ways to use computers and new technologies to enhance the practice of dentistry.  Dental informatics specialists:

• Create theoretical models that help dental researchers test new ideas, systems and approaches. A model for oral cancer, for example, would include information about symptoms of the disease and biological processes that affect cancer growth. Tools built on this model can help dentists diagnose patients quickly and accurately. Researchers can use the model to test theories about how to treat disease.
• Design and implement computer applications that provide dental researchers, educators and dentists with easier access to patient information. One on-going challenge in dental informatics is building a computer-based charting system for dentists that can effectively incorporate a patient’s entire dental record. While many doctors now maintain electronic patient records, 98% of all general dentists still use paper charts.
• Implement systems to ensure that they operate correctly and are easy for dentists and their staff to use. Many early systems built by dental informatics professionals are still not in regular use because they are too expensive to install or too complex to operate.  
• Evaluate systems to determine if they are actually helping to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs or improve practice efficiency.

The field of dental informatics is only about 20 years old, but it has great potential to improve dental research, education, and patient care. Important issues being studied by dental informaticians include:

• Creating an electronic oral health record
• Developing devices that enable dentists to record patient information at the chairside
• Enabling teledentistry
• Compiling geographic information for dental epidemiology studies
• Developing standardized vocabularies for dental diagnosis and treatment
• Supporting genetic studies in oral health
• Developing software for dental education
• Creating virtual reality simulators that let dental students practice clinical skills
• Developing automated systems to simplify dental office management

You can download, save and print a PDF of this career profile:

Dental Informatics 31 Dec 2008 [pdf, 186 KB]

Working Conditions

Experts in dental informatics typically work in a university, dental school, government agency or research organization associated with a large corporation. They usually work as part of a team that may include researchers from other disciplines, as well as technicians and students.

Dental informaticians work on long-term research projects that require patience and attention to detail. They must keep informed about developments in related areas of computer science, information science, cognitive science, telecommunications, linguistics, engineering and other areas, so they can find ways to apply new developments to dental research and practice.