How we obtain and process information from our patients is essential to their health and to the effectiveness of our dental healthcare practice. Collecting this often huge amount of information can be time-consuming and less than efficient, as new protocols and systems are continually being developed and recommended. We need to arrive at the correct diagnosis or the appropriate risk assessment—to do this, we must organize and interpret self-reported information from patients and results from diagnostic tests, along with our own and our staff’s observations.