SNOMED International and the Dentistry CRG are developing a draft implementation guide for dentistry. You can review it here: Dental Implementation Guide (draft). This is an open invitation for members to add to, comment on, and help shape this content — the more directly you contribute, the better it will reflect real dental use cases.
SNOMED International as a draft development of an implementation guide for dental. It is formatted similarly to other implementation guides they have developed and, I believe, would be of significant assistance to electronic records vendors working in the dental space as well as larger dental clinics and organizations.
It would be great if you could take some time to review this draft and offer comments on how it might best serve the profession and the target audiences above (or should there be other target audiences too?).
If we consider dentistry to be one of the multiple specialty areas in the overall health care field, this approach to implementation seems to make sense to me. Is there additional information or tools that might make implementation by the target groups even easier? Your input would be very helpful.
One idea I have after reviewing this, is that we may need to add a segment for periodontal status/conditions, etc. Periodontal considerations may be a driving factor in enhancing use and implementation both from vendors specializing in electronic dental records as well as integrating with more comprehensive medical electronic records systems such as Epic, Orion, and Oracle, among many others.
If you see other possible gaps that might be critical for ease of implementation or have comments about the above periodontal idea, please respond and we can have a further discussion online.
Thank you for taking the time to review this document.
Mark Jurkovich