If you’re in the business of oral health, dental charting is crucial for documenting and tracking patient progress. We’re here to explain what dental charting is, why it’s important and how dental software can help.

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What This Article Covers

• What Is Dental Charting?
• Notation Systems
• Importance
• Preparation
• Best Practices
• Benefits
• Next Steps

What Is Dental Charting?

Dental charting is the recording of a patient’s dental structure and oral health to understand the condition of teeth and gums. It often involves using pictorial or graphic forms to provide a visual representation.

The primary purpose of dental charting is to prepare detailed care plans for patients. With all the measurements on paper, you can plot the best way to administer care. It’s often used to record:

• Tooth mobility
• Furcation involvement
• Gingival margin (mm)
• Probing depth (mm)

Being a dental professional, you need to create and update dental charts on paper or in dental charting software after or during every patient visit. Often uploaded as a grid chart, this helps you monitor gum disease spread, record tooth decay and map out a patient’s dental structure.

It offers a visual representation to record information about these different teeth’s surfaces:

• Incisal or occlusal surface
• Buccal or labial surface
• Distal surface
• Mesial surface
• Lingual or palatal surface

Notation Systems

Dental charting uses different notation systems that provide measurements accounting for individual tooth types. You can also differentiate details about real teeth vs. false ones. Some of the globally accepted notation systems include:

• Universal Numbering System: This system uses standard numbering, i.e., 1-32. You count teeth in a clockwise pattern starting from the upper right.
• Palmer Notation: This notation uses symbols (⏌⎿ ⏋⎾) to denote the quadrant of a patient’s particular teeth. It uses 1-8 for adults and alphabets A-E for deciduous teeth.
• Alphanumeric System of Notation: This type of dental charting notation divides the mouth into four parts (upper right, upper left, lower right and lower left). Same as the palmer system, it uses 1-8 for adult teeth.
• FDI World Dental Federation Notation: The FDI approved dental charting notation is popular worldwide. It implements a double digit system in which the first reflects the tooth quadrant (same as alphanumeric notation) and the second demonstrates the tooth.

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Importance

Dental charting systems are one of the best tools you have at your disposal to collect and organize dental information categorically. By creating a detailed chart, you have access to all the information regarding the health of a patient’s teeth.

In today’s day and age minimally invasive dentistry is the norm. It focuses on prevention through instruction about a patient’s dental condition. Therefore, clear representation of a patient’s dental structure is critical.

Another use of dental charting is to identify a person through dental records. Forensic scientists usually use it in post-mortems to pull up information about a victim. It’s a useful tool, as teeth are resistant to damage unless there is a severe blow.

As treatments progress dental structures change from time to time. So you should update charts with new findings after every appointment.

Preparation

When new patients come for an appointment, the first thing you should inform them about is dental charting. Perform a detailed study of the patient’s teeth and gum depths and shout out specific numbers for your assistant to note.

In most cases, you’ll begin by numbering and counting the total sets of teeth. However, if there’s an issue like a cavity or spacing, chart a full set to start treatment.

Post numbering, move on to probing tooth infections and gum diseases, if any. Here, you must perform a process called periodontal charting — six readings for one tooth. It’s done with an instrument called a tooth probe that helps you check the teeth for any decay.

Begin the next process, which is likely scaling, and then prepare the chart. On examining, if there’s any issue that requires treatment, investigate it thoroughly.

Best Practices

Maintaining patient records might be a time-consuming ordeal for your dental clinic. However, you and your patients need to have a detailed representation of dental data.

Dental charting plays a crucial role in keeping records. There are some popular practices in place that you need to know before commencing with dental charting.

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Use Dental Software

In our digital age, it’s common for dental practices to use software to help with everyday tasks — from patient scheduling to treatment to medical billing.

There are various types of dental software depending on what you need, including:

• Dental EMR systems
• Dental imaging software
• Dental medical billing platforms
• Dental scheduling applications

While you may be able to opt for these as standalone solutions, it’s more common to choose a suite that offers these various modules and other capabilities for an all-encompassing solution.

Dental EMR modules are where you’ll likely find charting capabilities, so pay close attention to what products offer in that vein, especially if charting is one of your primary dental software requirements.

Once you pick a platform, make sure you familiarize yourself and your employees with it to make the most of its charting capabilities.

Educate Staff

Every clinic has its own standard procedures and operations. Provide clear instructions to employees regarding your clinic’s style and what you expect from them. This’ll help you ensure that your staff is on the same page regarding charting and measurement notations.

If needed, you can look for a solution that automates the recording process through speech-to-text dictation.

Double-Check Charts

Double-checking anything is a good habit. Even if your and employees are completely aligned, it doesn’t hurt to go over it once again. You can ask your assistant to read through the entire chart or you can check it after an appointment.

Maintain high standards while recording patient information, as there are strict government regulations in the U.S.

Encourage and Follow Up With Patients

Encourage patients to stick to the care regimens you provide and send reminders to schedule follow-up appointments. Further, provide home remedies such as flossing schedules or electronic toothbrushes.

Dental software can help automate and facilitate certain processes like sending appointment and follow-up reminders, providing treatment instructions, and even sending e-prescriptions.

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Primary Benefits

There are various dental charting benefits for both patients and health care providers. It helps you provide patients with a visual representation of their oral health. For providers, it helps create a holistic look into the dental structure and health of a patient.

For Patients

Dental charting is a practice by which you create an overview of a patient’s dental structure. It helps them plan a patient’s care plan better and look for ways to improve teeth conditions.

It might seem that dental charts don’t have any benefits for patients, but there are a few of them. Let’s take a look.

• Using dental charts, you can maintain a history of patient measurements and health. With a complete history, you can better monitor changes. And the better you can monitor changes, the better you can treat them and provide recommendations, which is definitely a benefit for patients.
• Going off of having a history of health, dental charts also help you track treatment history. Patients may not remember the full treatment history you’ve provided, so it’s beneficial for them if you have a quick reference to share and go off of.

For Dental Professionals

Dental charting is essential for dental clinics and hospitals. Not only does it help you improve patient outcomes but it also helps you maintain dental records of individuals.

Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of dental charting for dental care providers.

• The chart acts as a reference point for you to provide useful tips and home remedies to patients in order to improve oral health.
• It also acts like a template that helps dentists mark current measurements quickly.
• An updated dental chart will help you share information with a specialist, such as an orthodontist, while referring a patient. If you deploy dental software with interoperability measures, you can share charts directly from the system.

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Next Steps

Dental charting is one of the most important aspects of dentistry. It involves recording key information regarding a patient’s dental structure to improve treatment for tooth decay and other diseases.

Now that you know about dental charting, you must be thinking about automating the process, right? We’ve got you covered. Head over to our free comparison report and check out the best medical solutions on the market providing dental charting capabilities.

How does dental charting help your practice? Let us know in the comments.