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Assessing Dental Practice Quality by Evaluating Radiology Items
Author(s) -
Hunt Ronald J.,
Fann Shen Jang,
Kantor Mel L.,
Morris Alvin L.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
journal of public health dentistry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.64
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1752-7325
pISSN - 0022-4006
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-7325.1992.tb02287.x
Subject(s) - medicine , audit , quality assurance , medical diagnosis , dental practice , medical physics , dentistry , radiology , quality (philosophy) , dental radiography , radiography , pathology , external quality assessment , philosophy , management , epistemology , economics
The DEMCAD dental office assessment instrument was developed to evaluate practice quality using Donebedian's quality assessment model of structure, process, and outcome. This previously validated instrument takes about six hours to complete. Subsequent analysis was undertaken to determine whether an abbreviated office assessment based on the evaluation of radiology items was sufficiently sensitive, specific, and practical to be used as a screening instrument for identifying dental offices with very low evaluation scores. Data for this analysis were obtained from 300 volunteer general dental practices evaluated in the field testing of the DEMCAD instrument. The nine radiology structure items predicted very poorly the overall structure scores. How‐ever, 13 radiology process items predicted overall process scores quite accurately. Four of the 13 radiology process items (periodontal diagnoses recorded, interdental bone shown on x‐rays, caries diagnoses recorded, and current x‐rays mounted) produced a combined R 2 of. 58. These four radiology variables predicted the 10 percent of the dental practices with the lowest overall process score with 87 percent sensitivity and 93 percent specificity. This analysis showed that an abbreviated dental practice process quality assessment using oral radiology items in an audit of patients' records may be feasible as a screening test for dental office assessment.