A Competition between Care Teams Improved Recording of Diagnoses in Primary Dental Care: A Longitudinal Follow-Up Study

INTRODUCTION: A playful competition was launched in a primary dental health care system to improve the recording of diagnoses into an electronic patient chart system and to study what diagnoses were used in primary dental care. METHODS: This was a longitudinal follow-up study with public sector primary dental care practices in a Finnish city. A one-year-lasting playful competition between the dental care teams was launched and the monthly percentage of dentists' visits with recorded diagnosis before, during, and after the intervention was recorded. The assessed diagnoses were recorded with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). RESULTS: Before the competition, the level of diagnosis recordings was practically zero. At the end of this intervention, about 25% of the visits had a recorded diagnosis. Two years after the competition, this percentage was 35% without any additional measures. The most frequent diagnoses were dental caries (K02, 38.6%), other diseases of hard tissues of teeth (K03, 14.8%), and diseases of pulp and periapical tissues (K04, 11.4%). CONCLUSIONS: Commitment to the idea that recording of diagnoses was beneficial improved the recording of dental diagnoses. However, the diagnoses obtained did not accurately reflect the reputed prevalence of oral diseases in the Finnish population.