5 Things to Ask For When You Request Your Dental Records
Requesting your dental records sounds like a single action. Call the old office, ask for your file, done. In practice, what arrives is often thinner than what you needed, and nobody did anything wrong. A general request produces a general response — frequently a summary or the most recent visit notes rather than the full history a new dentist is actually working from. The fix is being specific. Five things worth naming individually. 1. The actual X-ray image files, not a report This is the most common gap and the most consequential one. X-ray findings written into a note are somebody's interpretation. The images themselves are the evidence, and your new dentist will want to look at them directly — bone levels, the area beneath existing restorations, anything watched over time. Ask specifically for the radiographic images, and ask what format they arrive in. Digital images sent as standard image files can be opened anywhere. Some practice-management systems export in proprietary ...