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eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project

BACKGROUND: In the twenty-first century, health systems have to cope with the challenges posed by their rapidly changing environment. Among these changes, the emergence of digital health solutions is an opportunity to make health systems better, but also a compelling force to change. Community denti...

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Autores principales: Németh, Orsolya, Simon, Fanni, Benhamida, Abdallah, Kivovics, Márton, Gaál, Péter
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9713149/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36456948
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12903-022-02603-6
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author Németh, Orsolya
Simon, Fanni
Benhamida, Abdallah
Kivovics, Márton
Gaál, Péter
author_facet Németh, Orsolya
Simon, Fanni
Benhamida, Abdallah
Kivovics, Márton
Gaál, Péter
author_sort Németh, Orsolya
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: In the twenty-first century, health systems have to cope with the challenges posed by their rapidly changing environment. Among these changes, the emergence of digital health solutions is an opportunity to make health systems better, but also a compelling force to change. Community dentistry is one area of health care, where the rapid technological development has the potential for substantial performance improvement benefitting dental patients in terms of access to care and conveniance. METHODS: This study is based on a survey of the dental care provided by three units (Oral Medicine, Periodontology, Orthodontics) of the Department of Community Dentistry, Semmelweis University, Budapest. During a period of 12 weeks, we have collected time balance data on 1131 patients, 539 in the traditional and 592 in a pilot teledentistry setting, in order to estimate how much time could be spared by monitoring patients through videoconferencing instead of face-to-face visits. RESULTS: According to our findings, teledentistry has the potential to shorten the visit with an average of 5–10 min per patient, which adds up to 58–116 work hours in a year. If the pilot was rolled out to all the 13 chairs of the surveyed 3 specialties (orthodontics, periodontology and oral medicine) the time saving would sum up to 186 workdays in one shift alone, which would translate to close to 4500 additional patients per year, considering remote patient monitoring cases alone. Further, if inactive doctors and highly qualified dental hygienists were involved in delivering telecare, 2.67 times as many workdays could be spared, which would allow about 12,000 more patients treated per year. CONCLUSIONS: The rapid development of digital health technologies coupled with the evolving task distribution between health professionals have a great potential to improve health system performance in pursuit of population health. Unfortunately, the adaptation to these technological changes is uneven, and without a national strategy, the poor will unlikely benefit from these opportunities in public dental care.
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spelling pubmed-97131492022-12-01 eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project Németh, Orsolya Simon, Fanni Benhamida, Abdallah Kivovics, Márton Gaál, Péter BMC Oral Health Research BACKGROUND: In the twenty-first century, health systems have to cope with the challenges posed by their rapidly changing environment. Among these changes, the emergence of digital health solutions is an opportunity to make health systems better, but also a compelling force to change. Community dentistry is one area of health care, where the rapid technological development has the potential for substantial performance improvement benefitting dental patients in terms of access to care and conveniance. METHODS: This study is based on a survey of the dental care provided by three units (Oral Medicine, Periodontology, Orthodontics) of the Department of Community Dentistry, Semmelweis University, Budapest. During a period of 12 weeks, we have collected time balance data on 1131 patients, 539 in the traditional and 592 in a pilot teledentistry setting, in order to estimate how much time could be spared by monitoring patients through videoconferencing instead of face-to-face visits. RESULTS: According to our findings, teledentistry has the potential to shorten the visit with an average of 5–10 min per patient, which adds up to 58–116 work hours in a year. If the pilot was rolled out to all the 13 chairs of the surveyed 3 specialties (orthodontics, periodontology and oral medicine) the time saving would sum up to 186 workdays in one shift alone, which would translate to close to 4500 additional patients per year, considering remote patient monitoring cases alone. Further, if inactive doctors and highly qualified dental hygienists were involved in delivering telecare, 2.67 times as many workdays could be spared, which would allow about 12,000 more patients treated per year. CONCLUSIONS: The rapid development of digital health technologies coupled with the evolving task distribution between health professionals have a great potential to improve health system performance in pursuit of population health. Unfortunately, the adaptation to these technological changes is uneven, and without a national strategy, the poor will unlikely benefit from these opportunities in public dental care. BioMed Central 2022-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9713149/ /pubmed/36456948 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12903-022-02603-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Németh, Orsolya
Simon, Fanni
Benhamida, Abdallah
Kivovics, Márton
Gaál, Péter
eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title_full eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title_fullStr eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title_full_unstemmed eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title_short eHealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
title_sort ehealth, teledentistry and health workforce challenges: results of a pilot project
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9713149/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36456948
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12903-022-02603-6
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