Chart history & perio trends

Rebrief keeps every periodontal exam — measured chairside or imported from your practice-management software — as a timeline you can replay, compare, and act on. This article covers the chart-history view, the progression watchdog, the chairside ghost, and copying a prior exam forward.

Opening chart history

• From the patient page: the perio history card charts the trend (mean probing depth, sites ≥6 mm) across exams. Click through to open the full Chart history view.
• During an appointment: the History toggle in the header opens the same view alongside the live chart.

Chart history is read-only — nothing you do in it changes today's chart.

The exam timeline

1. Drag along the exam timeline to move between exams. Exams are spaced by real calendar distance, so a long gap looks like one.
2. The small histogram above the timeline shows how much changed between neighbouring exams, so you can spot the interesting interval at a glance.
3. Badges on each exam tell you where it came from — Measured in Rebrief or imported from your practice-management software. Imported exams typically carry probing depths and bleeding only, so some comparisons aren't available for them. Hollow timeline ticks mark imported exams; dimmed ticks mark partial chartings.

When you compare two exams, the delta table only compares sites that were measured in both — and changes under 2 mm are labeled "Within measurement noise", because probing normally varies about that much between examiners.

Sentinel — the progression watchdog

The Sentinel panel watches the timeline for real periodontal progression:

• Progression confirmed appears only when strict rules are met — a change that persists across consecutive exams, a single large change, or matching changes on multiple non-adjacent teeth. Softer Watching findings show only here, not as alerts.
• Each finding carries evidence chips that jump you to the exact pair of exams behind it, and Show the math explains how it was derived.
• Any staging suggested from chart data alone is provisional — it always notes that radiographic bone loss was not assessed — and a grade is refused outright unless the record spans enough years to support one.

On the patient page, a confirmed finding shows as a red Progression confirmed chip, with a Start perio recheck button that books a recheck carrying the same probing order as last time — re-probing in the same order is what keeps the comparison honest.

The chairside ghost

While charting, the Ghost toggle in the appointment header draws the previous exam under today's chart as dashed lines, so you can see departures as you probe. Voice charting joins in: after a notable change, the feedback banner adds a baseline callout like "16 DB was 4 in Oct 2025."

Starting from the last exam

New appointments open with an empty perio grid on purpose: restorations and other durable findings carry forward automatically, but measurements never do — the prior exam appears only as the ghost until you re-measure.

If you do want the prior numbers in today's grid, click Start from last exam. Copied values are marked as copies and excluded from today's exam record until you actually re-probe a site, so a carried-forward number can never masquerade as a fresh measurement.

Handing off

The Handoff panel turns any comparison into something you can send:

• Copy summary — the change table as text.
• Insert into note — drops it straight into today's clinical note.
• Copy referral draft — a ready-to-edit colleague letter built from the same numbers.

The patient's AI summary card includes the same perio-trend facts, and every number it states is checked against the chart before the summary is shown.