IDENTIFICATION OF POPULATION-BASED DIGITAL ORAL HEALTH PROJECTS IN LOW AND MIDDLE INCOMES COUNTRIES: A SCOPING REVIEW
Creators: name: Inquimbert, Camille
name: Tantawi, Maha El
name: Nourhan Aly
name: Giraudeau, Nicolas
name: Hams Abdelrahman
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Dentistry
subject: FOS: Clinical medicine

description: Aims and objectives
The aim of this scoping review (ScR) is to identify, explore, and map the literature on digital oral health interventions in LMICs and to shed light on challenges and opportunities facing the implementation of these interventions and projects.

Detailed description of project design and methods:
The proposed ScR is based on the framework outlined by Arksey and O’Malley, including five steps:

Step 1: Identifying the research questions
The ScR questions are: What are the digital interventions and projects to support oral health among LMICs populations? What is the available evidence for their effectiveness? Which characteristics are associated with positive outcomes? What challenges and barriers prevent the integration of digital health into clinical practice?

Step 2: Identification of relevant studies
A search will be conducted in the following electronic databases: Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Potentially relevant grey literature will also be identified through targeted search of dissertations/ theses, conference abstracts, websites and government/ organization reports. A hand search will be conducted for the references of the included studies and websites. The databases for registered clinical trials will also be screened. Search terms related to digital health and oral health will be used, with various combinations in each electronic database while using controlled vocabulary with the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. The search terms will be tailored to each database.

Step 3: Selection of studies for inclusion
The retrieved resources will be checked for duplicates. After removing the duplicates, the selection process will involve two stages. The first stage will be an initial screening of titles and abstracts by two independent reviewers. The second stage includes the screening of full texts of the retrieved articles, reports or website content. Resolving disagreements will be through a third reviewer to reach consensus. The screening will be against inclusion criteria: studies describing the use of digital interventions, conducted in or with implications for LMICs as identified by the World bank databank, and targeting or describing oral health or dental practice. Only studies/ resources published in the last ten years will be included. Studies/ resources with no full text will be excluded. Studies and resources not in English, French or Arabic will also be excluded.

Step 4: Data Charting
A data charting form will be used to capture the characteristics of the included studies and key information relevant to the review questions. Extracted data include date of publication/ resource, country, level of application (multi-country national, district or provincial, and local or peripheral), and primary user based on the WHO classification (population, healthcare providers, health system or resource managers and for data services). A data chart will be piloted by two reviewers on 10 studies, and differences in charting will be resolved by a third reviewer. After the pilot trial, the results will be discussed to determine whether the data chart satisfactorily captures the information to align with the research questions of the ScR. 

Step 5: Collection, summarisation, and reporting of results
The three steps suggested by Levac et al. will be followed: to analyze the data, to report the results and to interpret the findings. The overall results will be reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist and be mapped using the PRISMA-P chart.