Perio Risk Assessment: Patient History

The Patient History screen contains four areas for required data input. Select the appropriate option for each field, then click Next. More elaboration of the terms is detailed below:

Dental Care:

This refers to standard treatment at a dental practice. Select “Emergency” if the patient has only received emergency treatment and otherwise never visited a dentist.

Smoking History:

This refers only to cigarette smoking. For PreViser use, based on current research, a "smoker" is limited to cigarette smoking. Other forms of tobacco could be deleterious but there is insufficient evidence at this time to include them in a Risk Assessment. Therefore, do not include cigar or pipe smoking, chewing tobacco, or other activities in classifying a patient's "Smoking History."

Diabetic:

This refers to all types of diabetes. If the patient is diabetic, rate the level of glycemic control as Good, Fair, or Poor. For specific information on these ratings please see the Diabetes Classification page in the Appendix.

Perio Exam Date:

This refers to the date of the exam, not the date of data entry. Input the date of the exam, in MM/DD/YYYY format. The system will calculate the patient's age for this Risk Assessment based on the Exam Date compared to the patient's birth date.

Note: The exam date must be equal to or earlier than the date when you transmit the Risk Assessment, according to the system’s logic which will not recognize a future date as valid. Therefore, you can enter a future exam date and save the Assessment for later (as Unfinished) but cannot transmit the data for Risk Calculation until that date is current or past.

By default on unfinished assessments, the Exam Date on the Patient Details page list appears as today's date (the date you start the new Risk Assessment).

You can also select a date by clicking the calendar icon next to the date field, which opens the calendar tool in a small popup window, shown below:
On the calendar tool, click on the date of the exam, which closes the calendar window and returns you to the Patient History screen with the Date field completed. If you wish to select a date from a different month, simply use the drop-down lists to change the month or year, then click on the date from the month displayed.


If a Patient is over age 89:

Remember that to remain compliant with HIPAA privacy standards, Risk Assessments cannot be performed on patients over the age of 89. For a patient age 90 or older, you will have to modify the data entry in order to transmit the risk assessment. You can enter all the data, but upon clicking Finish at the end, a message will inform you that the patient age must be between 1 and 89 years. At that point, you can return to the Exam Date or the Patient Details page and change the year so that the system calculates the patient's age as falling within those parameters. (In other words, change the patient's apparent age to 89, to force the information to transmit. This will not affect the risk score.)

See this page in the Medical Privacy topic for more information about this requirement and ways of setting the system to allow data to transmit for a patient of that age.

Prepared By:

This name appears in the report heading to indicate who prepared it. By default, this field displays the current Name which appears on the Account Options page. However, you may change that name if you wish, which allows you to permanently indicate which clinician prepared a particular report. This may be useful if you have multiple doctors and hygienists using the RiskCalculator and you want the reports to show the individual preparer's name. Also, if you acquire a patient or patients' records (by referral or by buying a practice, for example), all the past Risk Assessments are marked with the name of the original person or practice that prepared the report.

For more specific details:

For information and definitions of terms on this page, please refer to the Perio Risk Assessment Definitions of Terms resources in the Appendix.

To move on from this page:

Clicking the Previous button from this screen returns to the Patient Details screen.

Clicking the Next button saves all the values you have entered for this Risk Assessment, and loads the Treatments Performed screen.

Note: You can leave some required fields blank at this point if you will be saving the Risk Assessment as Unfinished and completing it later. The system allows you to move among the various components of a Risk Assessment without forcing you to complete all required fields. The system will check and enforce that all required values have been entered when you click “Finish” on the final Clinical Information screen at the point where data is transmitted to PreViser for calculation.