OHD

OHD provides a standardized ontology for representing oral health and disease data to enable integration, analysis, and reuse of electronic dental records (EDRs) across healthcare and life-science systems.

Key Features:

• Standardized Framework: OHD is an open-source ontology providing a common framework for dental and medical healthcare information to promote interoperability between Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.
• Ontology Structure: OHD comprises over 1900 classes and 59 relationships and reuses existing ontologies from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry.
• Semantic Consistency: OHD applies BFO-based realist ontology principles and is compatible with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for well-defined semantics.
• Integration Capability: OHD supports bridging dental data with other healthcare disciplines by providing a unified data backend for integration and interoperability.

Scientific Applications:

• General health monitoring: Enables analysis of dental data in contexts such as heart health and systemic disease management by linking oral and systemic health information.
• Multi-practice research and quality improvement: Facilitates collection, integration, and comparative analysis of EDR data across multiple practices to support clinical research, survival analysis, and healthcare outcome assessment.

Methodology:

EHR/EDR data from dental practices are translated using the LSW2 software library into OWL representations based on OHD, stored in a triple store and queried with SPARQL, and have been used for clinical analyses such as survival analysis of resin filling restorations performed with R.