Needs and workflows often vary considerably between one clinic and another. Accordingly, clinics may use Cerbo in very different ways and may prefer different configurations within Cerbo to support their workflows. Behind the scenes, Cerbo has settings and options to set preferences and defaults throughout the system. System Settings now provides a way for clients to see the settings options and make changes themselves.
There are too many ways that System Settings may be used to list in a helpful way. However, below are a few specific use cases for why and how a clinic may use System Settings.
The Patient Portal (or Client Portal) is likely the primary way that your patients interact with your clinic online. A Portal that works well and is tailored to your clinic can help improve your patients' experience with your clinic and reduce the administrative burden on your staff.
Using System Settings, each clinic can see the available configuration options, and tailor their own Patient Portal to better suit their needs and the needs of their patients. Including:
Different providers within the same clinic may have different needs and preferences. User-specific settings can be used within the System Settings to set their defaults accordingly.
For example, Dr. James is a primary care provider and works with Jeanine, a dietitian and health coach. They start their workday at different times. Dr. James has an MA who triages her incoming appointment and other portal requests, while Jeanine handles her own incoming appointment and other portal requests. Dr. James likes to share only the Assessment and Plan from her encounter notes with the patient on the Portal, while Jeanine shares the full text body of her encounter notes.
Using System Settings, the preferences for each of these users can be set differently, so that their calendars show their typical working hours and Jeanine’s calendar shows the Appointment Requests block with her incoming requests, while Dr. James doesn’t see the Appointment Requests block. The encounter note signing window can default to sharing the full encounter note body for Jeanine’s notes, but not for Dr. James'. On the patient’s chart, Dr. James can see the patient’s medications front and center, while Jeanine can see their supplements in that block. Among many other preferences that they can set either practice wide, or by user.
Different clinics may handle billing very differently. Some bill insurance versus taking cash versus using subscriptions - and clinics may use a combination of these. Some sell prepaid packages and want to track what patients have purchased versus what’s been used. Some pay commissions to their staff based on sales. There are a variety of settings within System Settings that clinics can use to tailor their billing experience to their needs. For example:
It is strongly recommended to review Cerbo's comprehensive documentation about the configuration options in System Settings prior to making changes. To view that documentation, click on this link.
Cerbo has an open API (https://docs.cer.bo/) architecture, which allows outside developers to build custom functionality or integrations that interact with the Cerbo application. The API User Management Console allows clinics to create their own credentials to pass along to developers. It is important to note that anyone with API credentials can see and modify the data in your EHR, including PHI. Clinics are responsible for setting and following their own privacy and security policies with respect to their API users. To learn more about the API User Management Console, click here.
Updates were made to the Cerbo permission matrix for clarity and usability. There were no changes to the functionality. However, the permission labels have been updated to the following:
For questions related to user permissions, please contact support@cer.bo
System administrators allowed to see the linked recovery email within 2-factor authentication (2FA)
System administrators will see the linked recovery email address on an account, as well as the 2FA number, when clicking the 2FA icon in Manage Users.
Questionnaire Builder
Clinics can now build and edit their own patient-fillable forms! These can be consent forms, with a drawing pad for patients to add their signature, as well as simple questionnaires and intake forms with text fields, radio buttons, etc. You can set certain questions to be required and add headers and text to the form, among other options. And more advanced features (such as totals/ scoring for numeric or scored answers) are coming with a future release.
Note that only forms built within the new form builder can be edited within the user interface. But once a form is built within the form builder, you can easily return and edit it at any time! To access the form builder, go to the Pt Portal menu, and then Questionnaire Manager. Click on Create Form at the top to create a new form or click on the pencil icon to the right of a previously built form builder form to edit it. More information about how to use the form builder can be found in our online help by clicking this link.
Prescribers need to know if a medication that they’re prescribing is likely to interact negatively with any of the patient’s other medications. With this release, known negative drug interactions are flagged at the right of the prescribing window. This avoids potential issues before they arise.
Submit a request to support@cer.bo if you this functionality is not yet turned on in your system.
Prescribers will now receive a notification when selecting a medication that has been discontinued by the manufacturer. And a therapeutic equivalent will be suggested if one exists. (Note that this is not a hard stop, as there can be valid reasons that a prescriber may want to prescribe a discontinued medication).
Clicking on a suggested product will reload the prescribing screen with the selected replacement medication.
More information regarding discontinued medications may be found here.
Improvements to the medications chart part to correctly display prescription information from the script including form and dose.
If a medication name is longer than allowed by Surescripts (the eRx network), a warning message will be displayed. This can occur with compounded medications that are added under Admin > Manage > Medications. To resolve the issue, the medication name would need to be shortened, and additional clarifying details provided, if needed, in sig and/ or Notes to Pharmacy field. Remember that you can save medication dosing profiles so that the desired details auto-populate when you prescribe the same medication in the future!
Current enhancements includes the display of months along the y-axis of the growth chart graph. In addition, improvements were made to consistently display vitals such as height, weight and BMI within the following views:
In addition to the standard growth charts, you can now visualize a pediatric patient’s growth on a growth chart specific to individuals with Down’s Syndrome.
Patient search includes ability to search by nickname
Patient search now includes nicknames, if a nickname is present.
The body of the encounter note in Cerbo has always allowed for lengthy notes. However, some providers reported running up against the upper limit in that field. So the maximum length of encounter notes has been increased from 64,000 characters to approximately 16 million characters.
Arizona time zone in appt notification emails and SMS reminders
When a patient is set to “MOUNTAIN/ARIZONA” under Patient Information > Pencil Icon > Home Address > Patient Timezone, their initial appointment notifications and all reminders will state “Arizona Time” instead of “MST” for maximal clarity.
For clinics that utilize our Propelr integration:
Display the last 4 digits of credit card payment upon hovering in billing history regardless of merchant vendor
When a merchant services integration is active, display the last four digits on the hover window when viewing a payment in the billing history. This view will display the card payment, regardless of the previous integrated processor. Previously if merchant services were switched, the hover would not display the previous payments.
Various new vaccine codes (KINRIX, Flulaval trivalent PF, and others) were added for state immunization reporting. See the full list of supported vaccines here.
Patient documents have been moved to Amazon S3, versus being stored on the same servers as the Cerbo application and other Cerbo files. The immediate practical benefit of this move is that documents will download more quickly. This improvement to Cerbo’s already good document download speeds may be especially noticeable for larger documents. Patient Documents
Patient documents are now generally quicker to download. Major infrastructure upgrades we’ve made will provide better reliability and improve overall system performance.
