Dental informatics and its impact on oral health: Revolutionizing dentistry

Biomedical informatics is one of the upgrading maturing disciplines. One of its subdisciplines, dental informatics, is beginning to emerge as its own entity. While there are numerous trained dental informaticians, dental faculty, and administrators, in general, they are not very familiar with dental informatics as an area of scientific inquiry. Scientific investigations in informatics center primarily on model formulation, system development, system implementation, and the study of effects. Informatics draws few of its scientific methods mainly from information science, computer science, cognitive science, and telecommunications. Dental informatics provides many types of research questions and methods from its parent discipline, biomedical informatics. However, there are indications that certain research questions in dental informatics require concrete solutions that have not yet been developed in other informatics fields. This article provides an overview of the unique features of biomedical and information sciences.