Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and the American Dental Association announced the first-ever living guideline program in oral health in a May 14 press release.
The initiative uses artificial intelligence to create and update new oral health guidelines based on published scientific findings. Unlike typical guidelines that update approximately every 3 to 5 years, the living guidelines will be “updated as soon as new evidence emerges and is carefully reviewed.”
Ashraf Fouad — chair of the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs — told Penn Today that the program will provide oral health professionals with “continually updated, evidence-based information to help improve the oral health of their patients.”
Hosted digitally, the program will utilize AI “to enable continuous and rapid incorporation of scientific findings,” according to Penn Dental associate professor Alonso Carrasco-Labra. The initiative, however, will adhere to the same standards of review that traditional programs rely on.
According to Fouad, oral disease is predicted to affect “almost half the world’s population,” with the number of cases “growing faster than the population worldwide.”
According to the ADA website, the program will identify gaps within oral health literature in cases when “there isn’t enough evidence to inform a particular topic.” The technology will inform future guidelines by identifying “the specific type of research needed to develop” them.
Clinicians are expected to use the information from the living guidelines as soon as they are “available to inform and advance patient care,”according to the ADA.
Guideline topics will be selected by an advisory board consisting of members of the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs and professional dental associations. The guidelines will contain "evidence-informed recommendations" formulated by these panels. Newly developed recommendations are expected to be sent to The Journal of the American Dental Association and published on ADA’s website.
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The first guideline — set to be released later this year — will serve as an update to a previous document from 2017 regarding potentially malignant disorders.
“We are proud to bring this important service to our profession and look forward to improving the oral health of millions of patients through these guidelines,” Mark Wolff, the dean of the Dental School, told Penn Today.
