The health, social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have already had a dramatic impact on the prevailing oral health care model and will continue to do so. The paper “Advocacy for a Digital Oral Health That Leaves No One Behind,” published in the JDR Clinical & Translational Research (JDR CTR), promotes the use of digital tools to offer opportunities to improve healthy behavior, lower risk factors common to oral diseases and other noncommunicable diseases and contribute to reducing oral health inequalities.
To mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, systems were quickly put in place in most countries to respond to dental emergencies, giving priority to distance screening, advice to patients by remote means and treatment of urgent cases while ensuring continuous care. Digital health was widely adopted as a central component of this new approach, leading to new practices and tools that, in turn, demonstrated their potential, limitations and possible excesses.
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