The Digitization Of Dental Implant Medical Record And The Retrospective Analysis Of Cases

The medical record is original documents of patients' therapy procedures, which include the basic information of patients, the courses of diseases, the reports of examinations and tests, doctor's advices, notes of surgery and so on. As a series of basic data, the medical record is very important in our clinical practices. Dental implant has many characters, such as long therapy procedure, regular return visits and diverse data, which are disadvantageous for cases' managements. If the managements of dental implant medical record can be digitalized, in other words, if an electronic management system for dental implant medical record can be developed, it will be good to facilitate the conservation of information, promote work efficiency, and carry out the retrospective analysis. This study, including two main parts, focuses on the dental implant medical record.In the first part of the study, we developed a software, the electronic management system for dental implant medical record, to facilitate our clinical works. This system was carried out through the combination of Borland Delphi 5.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The procedure of development included need and background analysis, module partition, code design, database structure design,application development, and the test and improvement of the system. The functions of the system are listed as follows:(1) Gather data rapidly, totally, and standardly.(2) Remind the return visits automatically.(3) Be able to collect and search relevant data.(4) Be able to create tables.(5) Manage X-ray films and photos.(6) Be able to do some statistics and analysis.In the second part of the study, we used the electronic management system for dental implant medical record to review 386 cases in the Implant Center of the West China Hospital of Stomatology from 1999 to 2004. In addition, we evaluated the quality of traditional paper medical records and the situation of patients' return visits. Moreover, we measured the marginal bone loss of the implants with the help of Electronic Scale(version 1.0), and protracted the curve of the bone loss to time. With the limitation, the study got the following results:(1) Among the 386 records, the complete ones were 205, 53.1 percent. The incomplete ones were mainly lack of radiographs and prosthetic information.(2) Among the 205 complete records, 55.8% patients had return visit records and 19.0% patients continued to visit their doctors every year after the restorations.(3) The marginal bone loss was observed mainly in the healing period and the first year of function, the values of which were 0.63mm and 1.57mm respectively. Then, bone loss began to slow down.