Kotter's change management approach to transforming oral healthcare delivery: A case study.

Introduction: Despite progress in research and technological advancements, the delivery of oral health care continues to be plagued by disparities in accessibility and affordability. Dental caries and periodontal disease remain major issues, and new challenges such as socioeconomic disparities and emerging public health dangers also contribute to the complexity of the issue. To address these challenges, dental education and oral healthcare delivery must shift their focus from disease treatment to disease prevention and health promotion.

Patterns of opioid use among Texas dental practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: The primary objective of this study is to assess factors that influence opioid prescribing by dentists and the role of these factors in the practice of dental pain control.

Design: A 25-question survey instrument was distributed to the study population for anonymous responses, covering dentist and practice demographics and opioid prescribing characteristics.

Setting: Private solo and group practice settings, including general practitioners and dental specialists.

Designing audit and feedback dashboards for dentists to monitor their opioid prescribing.

Background And Objective: Prescription drug abuse is a major factor leading to drug overdose deaths in the US and dentists are one of the leading prescribers of opioid pain medication. Knowing that Audit & Feedback (A&F) dashboards are an effective tool and are used as quality improvement interventions, we aimed to develop such dashboards personalized for dental providers which could allow them to monitor their own opioid prescribing performance.

Methods: In this paper we report on the process for designing the A&F dashboards for dentists which were developed by using an iterative human-centered design process.

Provider-directed analgesia for dental pain.

Introduction: Extraction of impacted molar teeth is a common procedure performed by oral surgeons and general dentists, with postoperative pain being a significant adverse event post-surgery. If mismanaged, pain can lead to complications that impact oral and systemic health. The current scourge of the opioid epidemic has ushered in a new era of provider-directed analgesic (PDA) therapy in dentistry.

Evolution of biofilm-adapted gene expression profiles in lasR-deficient clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates.

The overall success of a pathogenic microbe depends on its ability to efficiently adapt to challenging conditions in the human host. Long-term evolution experiments track and predict adaptive trajectories and have contributed significantly to our understanding of the driving forces of bacterial adaptation. In this study, we conducted a cross-sectional study instead of long-term longitudinal evolution experiments.