Module guide · Clinical

Dentistry

Chart a mouth tooth by tooth, price the work before it starts, and keep what was planned and what was actually done in one record so the two cannot drift apart.

Overview Dashboard Examinations Charting the mouth Procedures Treatment plans Patient record Analytics & export Good practices

What this module is for

A dental practice inside the hospital: examination, charting, treatment planning with a quoted price, and the work itself.

Who uses it

Dentists, dental surgeons, dental hygienists and dental assistants, plus administrators. The chair-side screens and the money screens are the same screens, so the person quoting a plan is the person who will do the work.

Where to find it

Open Dentistry from the sidebar. Six screens: a dashboard, Examinations, Procedures, Treatment plans, a per-patient record, and Analytics, with a separate Import & export page.

1
Open an examination
Patient, date, visit type and dentist are enough to start; it opens as a draft.
2
Chart the mouth
Record a condition against each tooth you looked at, with surfaces where they matter.
3
Finalise it
Finalising freezes the caries index (DMFT) counted from the teeth you charted.
4
Plan and price the work
Group the proposed procedures into a treatment plan and present it — that freezes the quoted price.
5
Do the work and record it
Each procedure moves from planned to completed on the same record, and can then be marked invoiced.

A few terms you'll see throughout

DMFT counts Decayed, Missing and Filled Teeth — the standard caries index. FDI notation is the two-digit tooth numbering (11–48 permanent, 51–85 primary) used on the chart. A recall is the date the patient is due back for a check-up.

Dashboard

Activity over a chosen window, and the work the practice is currently carrying.

The top row counts examinations and patients seen, procedures done against procedures still planned, average DMFT, plan acceptance rate, accepted and declined value, and the share of extractions among extractions plus restorations — the last one being the question of whether the service saves teeth or removes them.

The queues below the counters

Field	What it means
Recalls due	Patients whose recall date has passed, oldest first.
Quotes awaiting an answer	Plans presented to the patient and never answered. These are the calls worth making.
Plans that have stopped moving	Accepted, started, and nothing done on them for two months.
Work put off	Procedures deferred rather than cancelled.
Completed work without consent recorded	Surfaced rather than blocked at the chair — consent is a conversation that sometimes gets written up late.
Patients with untreated decay	Driven off the stored index, so it means decay counted at the chair.

Examinations

Every examination and the odontogram recorded with it.

Search by number, complaint, diagnosis or code, and narrow by visit type, status and date. Tabs give you All, Recalls due and Untreated decay.

What an examination records

Field	What it means
Visit type*	Check-up, Pain, Emergency, Trauma, Scale and polish, Follow-up, Treatment visit, Orthodontic review, Prosthetic, Surgical or Paediatric.
Dentition	Permanent, Primary or Mixed — this decides which chart you are shown.
Chief complaint & history	What the patient came in for, in their words, and how it developed.
Pain	Tooth complained of, character, score out of ten, and what triggers it.
Extra-oral / intra-oral findings	Free text.
Oral hygiene, periodontal status	Good/Fair/Poor, and Healthy through to Severe periodontitis.
Plaque score, bleeding on probing	Both as percentages.
Radiographic findings, diagnosis, advice	Free text.
Caries risk	Low, Moderate or High. It suggests the recall interval.
Next recall	A date, or an interval in months taken from the caries risk.

Draft — opened, still editable, index not yet frozen

Completed — finalised; the DMFT is fixed

Amended — reopened and changed, with the reason kept on the record

Cancelled — withdrawn

The index only knows the teeth you charted

The DMFT is counted over the teeth charted at that visit and says nothing about teeth that were not examined. A screening round that looks at six teeth produces an index over six teeth, not a whole-mouth score.

Charting the mouth

The odontogram: a permanent or primary chart in FDI notation, quadrant by quadrant.

Select a tooth on the chart and record a finding against it. Teeth you do not touch stay not charted, which is deliberately different from sound.

Per tooth

Field	What it means
Condition*	Sound, Caries, Retained root, Filled, Filled and decayed again, Temporary dressing, Crown, Veneer, Bridge abutment, Root treated, Sealant, Extracted, Never formed, Removed for orthodontics, Bridge pontic, Implant, Unerupted, Impacted, Fractured, Mobile, or For extraction.
Surfaces	M, D, O, I, B, L, C — mesial, distal, occlusal, incisal, buccal, lingual, cervical.
Needs treatment / Urgent	Two separate flags; urgent teeth surface on the dashboard.
Seen on radiograph	Marks a finding that was not visible clinically.
Mobility (0–3), deepest pocket (mm)	Periodontal detail where it applies.

A finalised examination is read-only; Amend reopens it and keeps the reason with the record.

Procedures

Planned and completed work, in one record so the two cannot drift apart.

A procedure is planned first and recorded as done later — the same row, not two. Thirty-three procedure types are available, from examination and radiographs through restorations and endodontics to extractions and periodontal surgery.

Planning and completing

Field	What it means
Procedure type, tooth, surfaces*	What is to be done and where.
Phase	1. Relief of pain, 2. Disease control, 3. Rehabilitation, 4. Maintenance — defaulted from the procedure type.
Scheduled for, fee	When it is booked and what it costs.
Anaesthesia	None, Topical, Local infiltration, Inferior alveolar block, Other block, Sedation or General.
Materials, findings, aftercare	Recorded when the work is done.
Consent recorded	A checkbox plus notes; work completed without it appears on the consent queue.

Planned — agreed, not yet started

In progress — started, multi-visit work

Completed — done; can then be marked invoiced

Deferred — put off rather than abandoned, and tracked

Cancelled — will not happen

Deferred is not cancelled

Deferring keeps the work on the books and on the dashboard's Work put off queue. Cancelling says it will never happen. Using cancel for both loses every conversation that ended in "not this month".

Treatment plans

What was offered, at what price, and what the patient said.

1
Create the plan
A title in plain words — "Restore the upper right and extract the retained root".
2
Add the work
Attach the proposed procedures; the quoted total and estimated number of visits come from them.
3
Present it
Presenting freezes the quoted price. Record what was discussed, the alternatives, the risks, and what happens if nothing is done.
4
Record the decision
Accepted or declined, with the reason — a plan turned down on price and one turned down on fear need completely different follow-up.
5
Work through it
Progress is counted from the procedures on the plan; close it as completed at the end.

The quoted price stands even when the fees move

If the procedures on a plan later total something different, the plan says so — and keeps quoting the figure the patient was actually given.

Print quote produces the document to hand over. Plans move through Proposed, Accepted, In progress, Completed, Declined and Cancelled.

Patient dental record

One patient, everything the practice holds on them.

What the record shows

Field	What it means
The mouth as it stands	The current chart, assembled from the most recent charting of each tooth.
Tooth over time	Pick a tooth and see every finding recorded against it, in order.
Caries index over time	A trend line — it needs two charted examinations before it means anything, and says so until then.
Outstanding work	Quoted and not yet done, with its value and whether it is booked.
Treatment plans, visit history	Every plan and every visit on file.
Recall	Flagged when it is overdue.

Download record produces the patient's dental record as a document.

Analytics, import and export

Caries burden, plan conversion, and whether the service is saving teeth.

Analytics covers average DMFT and its trend by month, the share of charted mouths carrying untreated decay, extraction share, quoted against accepted value, plan acceptance and completion, deferral rate, consent recorded, and breakdowns by dentist, visit type, procedure, tooth condition, caries risk and diagnosis.

Import: charting from CSV

Field	What it means
Shape	One row per tooth, for screening rounds and outreach. Rows sharing a patient and a date become one finalised examination.
No DMFT column	The index is counted from the teeth you send, using the same rules as the clinic.
Patients	Matched on medical record number, and never created.
Tooth numbers	FDI. A number that is not a tooth is rejected with its line number.
Duplicates	Two rows for the same tooth on the same day are reported, not silently merged.

What the exports deliberately leave out

The examination, procedure and plan exports carry numbers, dates, categories and fees. They carry no history, findings or post-operative notes — a spreadsheet is a file that gets emailed.

Good practices

Chart what you looked at, not what you assume

Leaving a tooth uncharted is a statement: nobody examined it. Marking it sound because it looked fine from across the mouth puts a fact in the index that nobody checked.

Present the plan before starting the work

Presenting is what freezes the price and records the conversation. Work started against an unpresented plan has a total but no evidence of what the patient agreed to.

Record the decline reason honestly

"Declined" alone tells the practice nothing. Cost, fear, a second opinion and moving away each need a different response, and the analytics can only separate them if somebody wrote it down.

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