This application continues funding for “The National Dental PBRN”, a national collaborative of practices and organizations across the United States that engages practitioners in the excitement of discovery for the benefit of everyday clinical practice and patients. The Specific Aims will be to: (1) maximize efficiencies to conduct national oral health research studies in general and specialty dental practices on topics of importance to practitioners and their patients; (2) provide evidence useful in daily patient care; (3) facilitate the translation of research findings into clinical practice; (4) continue our work during previous funding periods to demonstrate consistent growth and productivity by streamlining the implementation of clinical research across the network, facilitating recruitment and retention, and developing public-private partnerships. The National Dental PBRN will accomplish these aims by building upon the many lessons learned from its highly-productive current national network. We aim to build on our experiences from these past 15 years using the same funding mechanism and administrative structure mandated in the FOA. The effectiveness of this structure is evident from our network’s high level of productivity, as judged by number of publications and completed studies, the size, scope, quality, and diversity of studies, and impact on health and daily clinical practice. The network will comprise six regional nodes, one specialty node, a central administrative core based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a central Coordinating Center. Other key elements of the governing and administrative structure will include a Practitioner Executive Committee, Directors Committee, Coordination Committee, Director of Communications & Dissemination, Director of Practitioner Recruitment & Engagement, Practitioner Training Component, Practitioner & Patient Compensation System, Publications & Presentations Committee, Central IRB, Data & Safety Monitoring Board, and NIDCR staff. Nodes will be based at Health Partners Institute (Minneapolis, MN); Kaiser Permanente (Portland, OR); UAB (Birmingham, AL); University of Florida (Gainesville, FL); University of Illinois (Chicago, IL); University of Rochester (Rochester, NY); and the University of Texas Health Science Center (San Antonio, TX). The purpose of the administrative supplement would be to support X01 studies done in response to NOT- DE-20-023 (Infrastructure Access for Research on COVID-19 Conducted in the National Dental PBRN).

The network’s overall goal is to do science that is immediately applicable to everyday clinical practice, to foster movement of its findings into everyday clinical practice, and thereby improve the health of the nation. The network will continue to be a highly collaborative environment wherein clinicians in everyday clinical practice, academic researchers, patient representatives, and their communities become engaged in “win-win” activities that each group sees as mutually beneficial and which improves health. The purpose would be to support X01 studies done in response to NOT-DE-20-023 (Infrastructure Access for Research on COVID-19 Conducted in the National Dental PBRN).