“The project summary [for the Overall Component] is a succinct and accurate description of the proposed work… This section is limited to 30 lines of text… 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. Consistent with specifications in the FOA itself, 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 the 2005-2019 funding period to demonstrate consistent growth and productivity by streamlining the implementation of clinical research across the network, facilitating practitioner and patient recruitment and retention, and developing public-private partnerships (to develop projects of interest to specific dental groups and specialties, practice types, special populations, and patient advocacy groups). 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 13 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 (UAB), and a central Coordinating Center. Other key elements of the governing and administrative structure will include an Executive Committee, Node Directors Committee, Steering Committee, Node Coordinators 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).

“Describe the relevance of this research to public health in, at most, three sentences.” 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.