title: BigMouth: a multi-institutional dental data repository.
abstract: Few oral health databases are available for research and the advancement of evidence-based dentistry. In this work we developed a centralized data repository derived from electronic health records (EHRs) at four dental schools participating in the Consortium of Oral Health Research and Informatics. A multi-stakeholder committee developed a data governance framework that encouraged data sharing while allowing control of contributed data. We adopted the i2b2 data warehousing platform and mapped data from each institution to a common reference terminology. We realized that dental EHRs urgently need to adopt common terminologies. While all used the same treatment code set, only three of the four sites used a common diagnostic terminology, and there were wide discrepancies in how medical and dental histories were documented. BigMouth was successfully launched in August 2012 with data on 1.1 million patients, and made available to users at the contributing institutions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Diagnostic and Biomedical Sciences Office of Technology Services and Informatics, School of Dentistry The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
authors.forename: Muhammad F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Walji
authors.affiliation: Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Elsbeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kalenderian
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health and Community Service, Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Paul C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Stark
authors.affiliation: Department of Preventive and Restorative Dental Sciences, School of Dentistry, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Joel M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: White
authors.affiliation: Office of Technology Services and Informatics, School of Dentistry The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Krishna K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Kookal
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Dat
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Phan
authors.affiliation: Office of Technology Services and Informatics, School of Dentistry The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Duong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tran
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Medical School, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Elmer V
authors.initials: EV
authors.lastname: Bernstam
authors.affiliation: Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ramoni
mesh_terms: D016494:Computer Security; D003219:Confidentiality; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D003792:Dental Records; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D008498:Medical Record Linkage; D012575:Schools, Dental / Q000458:organization & administration*; D012984:Software; D014481:United States; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled
keywords: Clinical Research Informatics; Data Repository; Dental