Publications by authors named "E T MERTZ"
Objectives: This work describes the process by which the quality of electronic health care data for a public health study was determined. The objectives were to adapt, develop, and implement data quality assessments (DQAs) based on the National Institutes of Health Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory (NIHPTC) data quality framework within the three domains of completeness, accuracy, and consistency, for an investigation into oral health care disparities of a preventive care program.
Methods: Electronic health record data for eligible children in a dental accountable care organization of 30 offices, in Oregon, were extracted iteratively from January 1, 2014, through March 31, 2022.
Objective: Despite the many advancements made in patient safety over the past decade, combating diagnostic errors (DEs) remains a crucial, yet understudied initiative toward improvement. This study sought to understand the perception of dental patients who have experienced a dental diagnostic failure (DDF) and to identify patient-centered strategies to help reduce future occurrences of DDF.
Methods: Through social media recruitment, we conducted a screening survey, initial assessment, and 67 individual patient interviews to capture the effects of misdiagnosis, missed diagnosis, or delayed diagnosis on patient lives.
Importance: Process-based quality measures are generally intended to promote evidence-based practices that have been proven to improve outcomes. However, due to lack of standardized implementation of diagnostic codes in dentistry, assessing the association between process and oral health outcomes has been challenging.
Objective: To estimate the association of adhering to dental quality measures with patient oral health outcomes.
Importance: While large oral health disparities remain by race and ethnicity among children, the associations of race, ethnicity, and mediating factors with oral health outcomes are poorly characterized. Identifying the pathways that explain these disparities would be critical to inform policies to effectively reduce them.
Objective: To measure racial and ethnic disparities in the risk of developing tooth decay and quantify relative contributions of factors mediating the observed disparities among US children.
Background: The goal of this study was to test the feasibility, reliability, and validity of the Dental Quality Alliance's adult dental quality measures for system-level implementation for ambulatory care sensitive (ACS) emergency department (ED) visits for nontraumatic dental conditions (NTDCs) in adults and follow-up after ED visits for NTDCs in adults.
Methods: Medicaid enrollment and claims data from Oregon and Iowa were used for measure testing. Testing included validation of diagnosis codes in claims data through patient record reviews of ED visits and calculations of κ statistic, sensitivity, and specificity.