Perio by voice · 5 of 9
Getting your chart to Mesio
Three ways the chart your assistant typed reaches Mesio so the two can be compared. Which one you use depends on your practice system, and one of them needs nothing at all.
The comparison needs both charts. Mesio has its own. This is how it gets yours.
Automatic — Dentrix, Open Dental, Eaglesoft
Nothing to do. When you sign the note, Mesio reads the perio chart your assistant entered and compares it. The result is on the visit and in the day's report a few moments later.
On some practice systems Mesio can read the chart exactly, value by value. On others the chart is drawn on screen rather than stored as text, so it has to be read visually. Both work. The second is treated with a little more caution, and Mesio always tells you which kind of read it did.
One right-click — Oryx and other browser systems
On the patient's perio page in your practice system, right-click anywhere and choose Compare this perio chart with Mesio. Pick which voice session it belongs to — the patient on screen is preselected — and press Compare.
Where Mesio knows its way around the page it reads the grid cell by cell, which is exact. Where it does not, it captures the page as an image instead. It will tell you which it did.
A picture — any system at all
Drag a screenshot or a PDF printout of the perio chart onto the shadow report. Mesio reads the patient name off it and lines it up with the session it heard.
Two things make this work better. Include the part of the screen with the patient's name on it, so it can match without asking. And capture the chart at the size it appears on screen rather than shrinking it, because the digits in a perio grid are small and a shrunken screenshot is a harder read.
If it cannot tell which session a capture belongs to, it waits and asks rather than guessing. The capture sits at the top of the report with a list of that day's sessions, labeled by patient and time, and you pick. Nothing is ever compared against a guess.
Read from a picture, and it says so
A chart read directly from your system is exact. A chart read from a screenshot is very good and can still misread a digit or put a bleeding mark one column across.
Mesio treats those differently, and tells you which it is looking at. A difference found in an exact read counts. A difference found in a picture waits for you to rule on it, because until then nobody knows whether the reader or the software was wrong. That distinction is the difference between a report you trust and a report that cries wolf.