Keynote Address: Informatics in Dentistry

Abstract

I want to begin by extending congratulations to this group for assembling with the purpose of planning to improve dentistry and dental health care through expanded use of informatics. I think this is a wonderful enterprise, and I think you have done extremely well thus far. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) collects books and journals extensively from the field of dentistry; I hope that we serve the dental profession well, and I hope we will serve it even better with your help. I will give you more detail on coverage and usage later in this presentation. First, I would like to mention several NLM programs that are open to dental professionals: There is a program of research grants, peer reviewed as they are at other NIH Institutes, in which the dental professions may participate. We never have enough funding to meet the need but we welcome the opportunity to review your proposals. Second, there is a medical informatics Training Program, now at eight sites in the country. NLM has the only authority for medical informatics training in the government and has done this for about 20 years. I ran a training grant program at the University of Missouri School of Medicine for 14 years where we always sought dental participation. Some training programs did this; some did not. There is full authority to include dentists in those programs, and I am sorry we do not have more. A third program of special note is IAIMS, Integrated Academic Information Management Systems. It sounds very bureaucratic, but I assure you that the bureaucrats did not dream it up. The Association of American Medical Colleges conceived it, and NLM implemented it. It is an initiative to support schools that want to develop a school-wide plan for information services, where school-wide means including all the relevant health professions, relevant sites, and relevant modalities. It is not a question of inventing things; rather it is a question of using what already exists in integrated fashion for the benefit of all health science departments on a campus. As it turns out, the schools spend far more money in the process than the government, but since it is for the benefit of the schools this is probably a fair enough division of resources. The University of Maryland is one of the leaders in IAIMS, and there are others as well. KeywordsMedical InformaticsUnify Medical Language SystemKeynote AddressDental ProfessionAmerican Medical CollegeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.