From the field: Our research and partnerships
Explore the latest studies and ongoing research from Willamette Dental and the Skourtes Institute.
)
COLLABORATION
Partnering to advance dentistry
The Skourtes Institute has partnered with organizations across the globe, including Harvard, the University of California San Francisco, the University of Texas Houston Health School of Dentistry, and Health Partners.
Some of our past projects have focused on developing and disseminating standardized dental diagnostic terminology, optimizing the quality of acute postoperative dental pain management, improving dental care quality, and reducing disparities in children’s oral health.
ONGOING RESEARCH
Current studies
The Skourtes Institute is currently engaged in the following studies:
Informatics approaches to understand and reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by dentists (NIH NIDCR R01DE032368)
The main goal of this study is to build a sustainable national dental learning health system focused on continuous quality improvement that facilitates providing patients with high-quality, evidence-based oral healthcare. This project seeks to quantify and understand guideline-discordant antibiotic prescribing and to develop improvement strategies to appropriately target prescribing to the right patients with the right antibiotic at the right time. The outcomes of our research will arm the dental field with the knowledge and know-how to measure and reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by dentists, resulting in better oral health and, subsequently, better general health for our patients.
Implementing dental quality measures in practice (NIH NIDCR R01DE024166)
This renewal project will implement caries-related dental quality measures across four diverse dental institutions, identify quality gaps, co-design an improvement intervention, and conduct a rigorous evaluation. We seek first to understand contributing factors in performance with regard to caries management and then develop and evaluate system-level approaches to improve the quality of caries management. The outcomes of our research will arm dental providers with both the knowledge and know-how to measure and improve the quality of dental caries management, resulting in better oral health and, subsequently, better general health for our patients.