Integrating Dental Working Experience in Development of a Dental Clinic Database System for a General Tertiary Hospital

Healthcare research Studies showed that information technology (IT) have a significant impact on improving health care safety, quality, and efficiency. It allows bringing down healthcare expenses, the reduction of clinical errors, and helping healthcare institution to manage various health care conditions. The aim of this paper is to present the gained experience and knowledge of a practicing dentist upon working on a database management system (DBMS) development project. The project aimed at building a conceptual model and a database system for storage, organization, and recovery of data for the dental clinic of a general tertiary hospital. The system specification and requirements were collected from working experience and discussion with the dental staff of the dental center of King Saud Medical City (KSMC) hospitals in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Data collected is used to build the database model and system architecture. The gained DBMS knowledge and novel concepts were very helpful in building various skills needed to: critically evaluate published literature on usage of DBMS in clinical environment, to identify new rewarding avenues for DBMS medical applications research. They also build familiarity and experience with the DBMS tools and methods, including data collection, search and analysis in dental practice.