Development of Military Teledentistry

Virtual health technologies came to the forefront during the COVID-19 Pandemic out of necessity to continue patient care and reduce risk of transmission. The US military began to explore the use of teledentistry in the mid-90s with the technology available at the time. The dental profession is slow at adopting the use of virtual health technologies as a capability to triage, screen, and monitor. Dentist to dentist consults routinely occur in both a civilian and military dental practice via email and phone consults. The idea of teledentistry for the future battlefield requires using existing technology such as advanced digital imaging, cloud technology, and video conferencing to shift towards a real-time virtual encounter. Real-time encounters create opportunities to evaluate a patient at a remote location when a dentist is not physically present. Advance development of virtual health technologies to include teledentistry expands the potential utilization of tele-triage, tele-screening, tele-consult, and tele-monitoring. These capabilities will be useful on the future battlefield during multi-domain operations as part of the Operational Virtual Health (OVH) capability. The application of OVH enables military forces to minimize morbidity and mortality on the battlefield to include prevention of unnecessary medical evacuation.

Comprehensive literature search was conducted in PubMed for published teledentistry research using military-related and battlefield use of teledentistry keywords.

Two articles were identified that satisfied all inclusion and exclusion criteria.

A review of relevant literature demonstrated a severe paucity of primary sources, highlighting an underdeveloped component of the virtual health capability required to expand access of dental services throughout the military operating environment.