In 2005, I had been practicing as a periodontist for about 10 years. At that point I was really curious to know how many dental implants I had placed and more importantly what was my complication rate. I decided to establish a retrospective chart review. Having been an early adopter of digital radiography, I was able to go back to 1998 to 2005 in my digital files.
I looked back at each case and created columns on the type of information I wanted to evaluate overtime to develop a database of my dental implant cases. I then used the same format of this electronic record to incorporate all cases from 2005 onward to present. After 20 years the real time database evaluates over 12,000 implants with 25 input variables.
