Practice-Based Research Program
Overview
The Practice-Based Research Program supports clinical research studies conducted in a clinical care setting with consenting patients. Essentially, it is research done in the “real world” of daily clinical practice. Practice-based research can generate important and timely information to guide the delivery of health care and improve patient outcomes, and it has the following features:
- Collecting data from clinicians about factors contributing to decision-making and procedures performed, and separately, collecting data from a patient's perspective
- Enrolling patients from a variety of practice settings and types, with each clinician contributing a relatively small number of patients
- Potentially accelerating the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based treatments for use by dental clinicians to prevent and manage dental, oral, and craniofacial diseases
The National Dental Practice-Based Research Network (PBRN) is a nationally coordinated program committed to advancing knowledge of dental practice and improving patient care. The goals of the National Dental PBRN are to support national oral health research studies in dental practices on topics of importance to practitioners and their patients, to provide evidence useful in daily patient care, and to facilitate the translation of research findings into clinical practice.
The Practice-Based Research Integrating Multidisciplinary Experiences in Dental Schools (PRIMED) initiative aims to foster a culture of scientific inquiry in dental schools. It is intended to provide dental school faculty, students, and residents with opportunities to conduct practice-based research in dental school clinics and affiliated clinics to foster development of clinical and patient-oriented research skills. This involves fostering intra- and inter-institutional collaborations, as well as peer and student mentoring partnerships, with the ultimate goal of stimulating additional clinical research pursuits.