Development of an oral health database for the management of clinical records

Purpose: The aim of this article was to present the conceptual model and development of an oral health database for storage, organization, and recovery of data from dental clinical records of a university dental school. Method: This is a joint project of the Graduate Programs in Dentistry and in Computational Science of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). During a period of three months in 2008, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the dental faculty of five clinical areas of the PUCRS Dental School (FO-PUCRS). Collected data were used to build the database language and architecture. Results: Conceptual, logical, and physical database models were developed, as well as the generation of a script in SQL (Structured Query Language). After generating the script, the tool Oracle SQL Developer (Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA, USA) was used to import and create the FO-PUCRS OHDB (Oral Health Database) implemented in the Oracle 10 g, a relational database management system (RDBMS). Conclusion: The FO-PUCRS OHDB represents an important advancement towards automating the institutional operational demands and will contribute to organize the clinical and social information of the patient population for administrative, educational, and research purposes.