Can utilizing business intelligence with electronic dental record data improve business decisions for dental organizations: a scoping review

Background: Business intelligence can give businesses the ability to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement and can help reduce uncertainty in the decision-making process. With the increasing use of electronic dental records creating more and more dental data each day, it is an opportune time to determine if the data can be coupled with business intelligence systems to improve the management decision-making process in dental organizations to result in service improvement. Methods: A scoping review was performed to map the research on the use of business intelligence in dental organizations and to identify any gaps in the existing literature. This scoping review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-Scr) framework. The following databases were searched: Medline, Embase, Emcare, Cinahl, Informit, Web of Science, and Scopus. Data extracted from the articles included the organization type, purpose/aims, the software utilized, data sources utilized, outcomes measured, decision-makers involved, service benefit type, and service improvements. Results: In all, 945 articles were found during the search strategy, with 25 articles selected for full-text review. Of these 25 articles, only 3 met the final inclusion in this review. All three included articles were centered around dental school organizations and all situated in the United States. All three articles demonstrated a benefit from management decision-makers utilizing business intelligence systems for improving service efficiency. Conclusion: There is limited evidence to show that managers utilizing business intelligence systems in dental school organizations can lead to improvements in the organization's services. There was no evidence to support the use of a business intelligence system in other types of dental organizations. More research is required in this area.