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Autonotes in Dental Records - Mike Hill, Trinity Chambers

07/09/12. Autonotes are common in dental records. They can be everything from a computer-generated sentence inserted by pressing a shortcut key, to whole accounts of the treatment carried out.  In themselves there is nothing wrong with autonotes but they do threaten to damage the dentist’s greatest advantage in a negligence claim: the sanctity of contemporaneous records.

Contemporaneous records are often the silver bullet in medical and dental negligence claims. Most claims are at least a year old before there is any real progress. The cause of action and the factual scenario will therefore be completely...

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