Year Four

The Senior Interdisciplinary Series course is divided in two sessions: the Literature Reviews/Evidence Based Dentistry in the fall and the Case Presentations session in the spring semester.

Literature Review and Case Presentations sessions give you the opportunity to assess, appraise, and communicate the literature as it applies to patient care. The spring session builds on your learning as you move into case presentations.

This course offers an overview of the practice choices available to you after clinical training. In one sense, this course is about transitions after clinical training; it strengthens your ability to make decisions regarding money management, insurance needs, career options, and the selection of advisers.

The goal of the third- and fourth-year clinical program is to provide you with a clinical experience that focuses on comprehensive care as well as a didactic program that enhances and supplements your growing expertise in basic and behavioral sciences. Throughout the course, you apply this knowledge to develop diagnoses and treatment plans and deliver appropriate, timely, and sensitive care to your patients. Throughout this work, you enhance the skills that prepare you for a career of life-long learning.

Advanced Clinical Practice of Orthodontics is a hybrid orthodontic course comprised of four online modules and one in-class session. Completion of the course also requires that you attend the Invisalign certification course.

The online modules follow the same format as an orthodontic consultation. In each online module, you evaluate a case based on a brief description, medical/dental history, images, and radiographs. After examining these materials, you answer between eight and 11 questions on the case in an online multiple choice quiz. Similar to an orthodontic consultation, the questions require you to have a basic knowledge of angle classification of occlusion, overbite, overjet, etc.

In this advanced clinical practice, you manage periodontal needs of your comprehensive care patients in the clinics. This course provides you with clinical experience treating a broad range of periodontal conditions from gingivitis to advanced periodontitis. You have the opportunity to deliver preventive care and non-surgical therapy and perform a periodontal surgery. You also gain experience evaluating therapeutic outcomes, performing periodontal maintenance, and determining when referral for specialty care is appropriate.

During this fourth year course, students continue to apply the fundamental principles and skills of operative dentistry to provide care for their patients while gaining increased speed and proficiency. By the conclusion of this course, students must demonstrate the ability to independently perform diagnosis and treatment planning as it relates to operative dentistry and independently perform procedures including the restoration of Class II and Class III lesions. Through recall examination, students learn to assess outcomes and provide follow-up care for patients.

This course is a continuation of the third year course where students begin to provide clinical care for children. Here too lies an opportunity for clinical orientation using google glass and reviewing a repository of clinical videos prior to patient care. It also offers an opportunity to monitor students who would wear the glass and the instructors can see ‘what they see’. Multiple students can be
clinically monitored by faculty, much like a screen with multiple cells/cameras.
This approach has potential to identify weaknesses and minimize clinical errors
by early recognition.

The clinical goals of this course are to: 1) obtain accurate diagnostic information from the patient prior to the initiation of treatment; 2) prescribe and provide restorative care in a logically and properly organized sequence; 3) develop treatment planning approaches which acknowledge patient’s biomedical and behavioral influences and; 4) provide foundation restorations for both vital and non-vital teeth.