Developing a User Interface and Integrated Workflow Data Collection for a Dental Implant Quality Register

Abstract

Health quality registers are commonly used and contributes continuously to a significant increase in quality of treatment and care within various areas of the Norwegian health care system. The use of health quality registers improves both quality of the treatments and products that are being used. This comes with various other benefits such as reduction of costs, a more efficient health care, less variations in the treatments that are given, more and better data for research, and a raise in both skills and competence within the health work force. All health quality registers are based on data reported from instances in the field. The data is the foundation of the analyzes and research that is conducted to achieve the improvement of quality. To ensure that this data is sufficient, it is crucial to have an efficient process of collecting the required data for any such register. This includes, among other factors, clear forms for data collection, high coverage of registered data (among all known cases), accessibility and user friendliness both for collection and later for access to the data and services. Nevertheless, within dental care there are no quality registers yet, even though the need for such registries is equally important as in any other field of health care. By the use of design science methodology, we designed and implemented an artifact in order to look into the data collection for a dental implant quality register. The aim of the design process was to gain an understanding of the domain, how data could be collected (interface, frontend), and how it could be represented (modelled, backend). This thesis has its focus on the development of the interface for the designed and implemented artifact. The evaluation of the artifact consisted of semi-structured interviews with experts within dental health care, dental implants and health quality registers. The interviews were both conducted with a focus group of experts, who participated through the entire development process, and with a final single interviewee, who conducted an evaluation towards the end of the project. Finally, the process of the development is discussed, contributions and problems problems are presented, and possible further work is discussed.