Voice-Activated Periodontal Charting Part of your dental cleaning is assessing the healthy of your gums. Our professional hygienist looks for symptoms and the severity of gum disease. This assessment, including measuring and tracking gum pockets is known as periodontal charting. Having a voice activated system helps us keep more accurate records with detailed information. The more information we gather, the better our service is for you. At Salem Dental Arts, we can help you have healthier teeth and gums beginning with the collection of information to help us do our job better. A dental cleaning involves several steps. One of the first steps is evaluating the gum tissue and assessing its health. Part of this is done through measuring the depth of any gum pockets. Gum pockets can develop from the bacteria in plaque. Your gum tissue should fit snugly up against your teeth. When a patient allows plaque to rest and remain along the rim of their teeth the bacteria can slip between the soft gum tissue and the tooth. The bacteria causes an infection of the surrounding tissue. The tissue can not fight the infection, so it responds by moving away from the source of the infection causing a pocket to form. Unfortunately, this also means moving away from your tooth. If the gum pocket reaches an unhealthy level, we want to remove the source of the infection and help the gums repair through cleaning. Our hygienist tracks and measures the gum pockets of each tooth. At Salem Dental Arts this is done using a voice activated system which supplies data to your periodontal chart. The measurements for a healthy gum pocket level is between 1-3mm and generally a normal dental cleaning will suffice. If a gum measurement exceeds 3mm, we may want to discuss further action to help. Traditionally, a hygienist may have only indicated in records the more severe numbers because it is time consuming to record all of the data. We feel that part of your tracking information should include what a measurement was over multiple cleanings and see the changes as they occur with each tooth. Then we can discuss ideas of how a tooth that had always been healthy before is suddenly unhealthy. This is where voice activated charting becomes helpful. Instead of manually entering numbers, our hygienist is able to record the data by voice while they work. No typing or stopping to turn toward the computer and touching keys is needed. This system is highly valuable to us, and to our patients, because:
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