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Dr. John Grubb steps down

Toni Magni posted on Nov 05, 2015

Dr. John Grubb has been of great help and an invaluable resource. He has most recently followed up to make work item ACT-6 A Digital Standard for Sharing Orthodontic Photographs progress steadily. We really hope he will still find time to volunteer work with us. His feedback is greatly appreciated and he will always be welcome to join us, physically or remotely.

Thanks John!

Email from John Grubb

It is time for me to step down as a representative of the American Association of Orthodontists and the American Board of Orthodontics to the Standards Committee on Dental Informatics (SCDI). The journey has been enjoyable working with so many talented and committed professionals; and, I will miss greatly the camaraderie.

I wish you and all of the people involved in the SCDI process the very best for the future success of this very important process!

Very respectfully,

John

John E. Grubb, DDS/MSD

Nuove regole legali per il gestionale di uno studio ortodontico

Toni Magni posted on Oct 15, 2015

Nuove regole prevedono che

ci sia un ulteriore consenso al trattamento dei dati che tratti specificamente il gestionale elettronico;
il paziente abbia la possibilità di non accettare che i propri dati vengano inseriti in un gestionale
lo studio informi al "Garante"entro 48h in caso il vostro sistema sia stato hackato e ci fosse il rischio, quindi, che i dati sensibili siano stati (volutamente o non) rilasciati a persone non autorizzate a leggerli.

Vedi Anche

Great chapter on 3D orthodontics published

Toni Magni posted on Sep 03, 2015

The open book Issues in Contemporary Orthodontics gets published today and with it, chapter 9, which covers 3D surface scanning for intra and extra oral images (3D impressions and 3D photographs) as well as 3D printing technology and how it could affect the orthodontic practice.

The chapter is called 3D Scanning, Imaging, and Printing in Orthodontics, has been written by Emilia Taneva, Budi Kusnoto and Carla A. Evans and is available directly from the publisher's website, or downloaded here.

Going paperless: On what resolution to use for document scanning

Toni Magni posted on Aug 31, 2015

Overview

When orthodontic practices go paperless, the question of resolution arises: what is the best resolution to scan documents? Rumors say that 300 DPI is the level that is suggested on-line for preservation of materials which will be destroyed but need to be maintained from a legal perspective. However, this resolution produces large amounts of data and can eat up drive space quickly.

X-Ray

The recommended resolution for 2D Cephalogram X-Rays is 12bit grayscale (ca 4k shades of grey) and 300DPI scanning resolution. This is based on published studies, that state that below this resolution, the identification of landmarks becomes less reliable. However, this is crucial only for x-ray which need to be measured, i.e. cephs and, in some rare cases, postero-anteriors. For all other x-rays, the minimum resolution to get the job done can be much less because the job gets usually done by simply looking at the radiograph, without taking any measurements.

In any case, i would avoid BMP: they can get extremely large and slow to manipulate. DICOM would be the way to go. But if that's not an option, a high-quality JPG works great too: It can provide some compression, while keeping the images usable.

Paper

While 150 DPI is enough for practical usefulness (in other words, for being able to read and understand all information which was present on the paper version of the scanned document) of maybe (i'm guessing based on my personal experience) 90% of printed material, 300 DPI will make a difference if one wants to OCR the scanned documents, or for those 10% of documents which have a very fine print. I have no idea about the legal perspective.

However, one would expect a modern database system not to have any issues with 300DPI scanned PDF files. I would personally therefore keep scanning at 300DPI, and upgrade storage solution/practice management server to a 1 or 2TB drive. A 2TB should allow an average of 180MB/patient, for 10k patients. That's about 20 9MB images (very high 300DPI xray or other). And in a few years, when they start getting close to the 10k patients, the practice probably upgrade storage to 10TB or so.

References

Congress wants to know details of software provider information blocking

Carla Evans posted on Apr 28, 2015

Information blocking occurs when persons or entities knowingly and unreasonably interfere with the exchange or use of electronic health information. This report focuses on potential information blocking by health care providers and health IT developers, including vendors of EHR technology.

Here's the April 2015 report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to the US Congress explaining the obstacles to implementing interoperability and informatics standards. The federal government has spent $28 billion on health IT and Congress wants to know the details of information blockage.

This report (see link below) from ONC to Congress was discussed at the April 21 meeting of the Illinois Health Information Exchange Advisory Committee. The gist of the discussion was that the pilot studies on EHR interoperability have been excellent, but further progress will be difficult due to the reluctance of vendors and stodgy institutions to adopt existing informatics standards, especially HL7 standards. The Chair likened the situation to selling cars, saying that the states will have to mandate features that software must have in a manner similar to emission standards for cars. Our dental software vendors are lagging also.

http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/reports/info_blocking_040915.pdf

2015b release of the DICOM standard is now available

Toni Magni posted on Apr 20, 2015

The DICOM Editor, David Clunie informs that the 2015b release of the DICOM standard is now available from the NEMA ftp site:

ftp://medical.nema.org/MEDICAL/Dicom/current/

It is also indexed from the DICOM Editor's status page at:

http://www.dclunie.com/dicom-status/status.html

This replaces the 2015a release.

Release notes are at:

ftp://medical.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/pdf/releasenotes_2015b.pdf

The changes from the 2015a release are shown highlighted in PDF files; note that changes to figures are not detected and some changed figures are not rendered in the diff files:

http://www.dclunie.com/dicom-status/status.html#DiffsStandard2015a2015b

dicom

Apple Healthkit API and EHR standards

Toni Magni posted on Mar 17, 2015

Apple announced the healthkit recently. A dive into the medical world. The idea is simple even though there has been an explosion in the number of mobile fitness apps which aim to track everything from food consumption to blood sugar levels, there was no way for doctors to get that information. HealthKit aims to bridge that gap by connecting medical providers and medical researchers with that health data.

The move is exciting, however, will Apple make use of an existing medical informatics standard? Is the Apple Healthkit making use of any existing medical software standard?

As far as i can tell, they are not. Apple's trend is to re-invent and come up with better ways of solving problems.

The purpose of the Healthkit, appears for now to be research only. It sounds, though, as if it could become the leading medical information exchange system. Similarly to what happened with ApplePay, Apple might come up with an easy way for a patient to send their clinical records to a provider, maybe even through an AppleWatch, and it most likely won't be using HL7 FHIR! Hopefully there will soon be bridges out there. Even with bridges, HealthKit doesn't model the medical field to the extent HL7 does, not even remotely.

It's just that the thought that Apple could be, possibly, maybe the future of medical informatics standards scares me. But then again, it most likely will not be...

Space shortcuts

Vedi Anche

Overview

X-Ray

Paper

See Also

See Also

References

See Also