The Development of a Dental Diagnostic Terminology

Abstract

There is no commonly accepted standardized terminology for oral diagnoses. The purpose of this article is to report the development of a standardized dental diagnostic terminology by a work group of dental faculty members. The work group developed guiding principles for decision making and adhered to principles of terminology development. The members used an iterative process to develop a terminology incorporating concepts represented in the Toronto/University of California, San Francisco/Creighton University and International Classification of Diseases (ICD)‐9/10 codes and periodontal and endodontic diagnoses. Domain experts were consulted to develop a final list of diagnostic terms. A structure was developed, consisting of thirteen categories, seventy‐eight subcategories, and 1,158 diagnostic terms, hierarchically organized and mappable to other terminologies and ontologies. Use of this standardized diagnostic terminology will reinforce the diagnosis‐treatment link and will facilitate clinical research, quality assurance, and patient communication. Future work will focus on implementation and approaches to enhance the validity and reliability of diagnostic term utilization.

Recording of diagnoses in public primary oral health care in a retrospective longitudinal observational study in a Finnish town: Underrepresentation of periodontitis diagnoses

“…Frequent recording of diagnoses also supports educational functions by providing the possibility to categorize patients in different treatment groups and thereby to compare the results of treatment actions. This will help to increase experience and expertise (Kalenderian et al, 2011).…”

Electronic primary dental care records in research: A case study of validation and quality assurance strategies

“…There has been limitated use of these data for epidemiological research as the information collected centrally within the NHS has related to payment and focused on treatments; and has not been sufficiently granular for epidemiological research. This has also been because primary care dentistry has yet to develop a commonly accepted standardised terminology to describe oral diagnoses,; lagging behind medicine in its codification of diagnoses (27).…”

Investigation of the Omaha System for Dentistry

“…The need for a terminology for dentistry in electronic health records (EHRs) is evident [1,2]. There is a significant push from within and outside of the profession to improve documentation for both research and recordkeeping purposes [3].…”

“…Knowledge representation in dentistry has primarily been limited to a procedure coding system, Current Dental Terminology (CDT13), for documentation within dentist's patient records [2,6]. CDT is designed to allow for documentation and billing of services provided.…”

“…Dentistry has a very limited ability to relate outcomes to services provided due to its lack of recorded diagnostic codes [2] and the general lack of standardized forms of documenting some of the factors identified above. Additionally, a widely held perception within the profession is that patients may not select the best available treatment option and/or obtain it at the optimum time, frequently due to financial limitations [9].…”