Deborah Polk, PhD is an Associate Professor of Dental Public Health in the School of Dental Medicine and has a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health.
She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Polk has founded a coalition, AGILE, whose mission is to advance health and well-being by accelerating the implementation of evidence-informed oral health guidelines.
Although there is no statutory requirement for dentists to follow evidence-informed clinical practice guidelines, guidelines can be considered to reflect best practices. Despite this, studies have shown that dentists face many barriers to providing guideline-concordant care, and patients often do not receive guideline-concordant care. Dr. Polk's lab evaluates the effectiveness of strategies across the oral healthcare system designed to help patients receive guideline-concordant care.
Dr. Polk's Current Research
Title: Dental Antibiotic Stewardship: Doctors' Needs
Funded by: Richard King Mellon Foundation
Principal Investigator: Deborah E. Polk, PhD
Description: The Pitt Dental Medicine team, together with UPMC collaborators, aims to improve antibiotic stewardship in dental care. The project will explore practitioners’ adherence to clinical practice guidelines regarding prescribing prophylactic antibiotics and develop effective implementation strategies to increase responsible use of antibiotics.
Title: Developing Collaborative Learning Models to Integrate Evidence-Informed Guidelines into the Delivery of Care in Dental Schools
Funded by: ADEAGies Foundation
Principal Investigator: Deborah E. Polk, PhD
Description: Despite the existence of evidence-informed clinical practice guidelines, we showed that few dental schools have developed effective processes to ensure that students deliver and patients receive guideline concordant care (Polk, 2016). The goal of our program is to advance the adoption of evidence-informed clinical practice guidelines in dental schools through the implementation of intra- and inter-school collaborative learning models. Our project is designed to assess the acceptability and feasibility of two models of collaborative learning that could be used by dental schools to improve their delivery of guideline concordant care.
Dr. Polk's Past Research
Funded by: U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Principal Investigator: Deborah E. Polk, PhD
Description: The objectives of the project were to develop a clinical practice guideline for the management of acute dental pain, develop and deploy dissemination and implementation strategies, and evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies in changing provider prescribing behavior. Upon completion of the project, the field obtained an established standard of care, patients should be receiving safe and effective relief from acute dental pain, and the risk of opioid diversion, opioid use disorder, and overdose is being reduced.