We gratefully acknowledge the substantial involvement of and assistance from the Technical Expert Advisory Group (TEAG). TEAG members are listed at the end of this appendix. The TEAG was meant in part to contribute to (1) advancing AHRQ's broader goals of creating and maintaining "science partnerships" and "public-private partnerships" and (2) meeting the needs of a broad array of potential consumers and users of its products. Thus, it was both a substantive resource and a sounding board throughout the study, and it is the body from whom "expert inputs" were formally sought at several points through the project.

We constituted our TEAG from three types of technical experts and other partners. These types are (1) technical/clinical experts; (2) patients or representatives of organizations whose mission concerns the interests and perspectives of patients and the public generally; and (3) potential users of the final evidence report, including explicitly a representative of the primary dental professional organization in the United States -- the American Dental Association (ADA). All in all, we had three clinical/technical experts, two individuals representing the public health perspective of the population at large, and two individuals representing potential user groups, for a total of seven persons on the TEAG.

The final decision about TEAG membership was based on candidates' availability for scheduled conference calls and other input, willingness to review materials and provide advice and assistance within a short turnaround time, and approval by the AHRQ Task Order Officer.

The RTI-UNC Center team solicited the views of TEAG members from the start of the project. Among other issues, TEAG members provided insights and reactions to key clinical questions, input to the literature review process by ensuring that we included all known published research meeting our inclusion criteria, review of our data extraction forms, and review of our draft evidence tables. TEAG members have also provided valuable input concerning problems of focusing a literature search on treatments, and specifying appropriate outcomes, for a clinical topic as complex as caries diagnosis and treatment.

In keeping with AHRQ's standards for employing a multidisciplinary approach to the development of evidence reports, we called on our TEAG for inputs at two key points during this task. First, the group was asked to comment on the literature synthesis and to give us feedback on our overall plans at that stage of the analysis, which included approaches to developing evidence tables and to summarizing information about outcomes associated with the diagnostic and treatment options being studied in our review of dental caries. Second, they were asked to review the draft evidence report for completeness, correctness, and clarity.