Read on below for a summary of the notable updates in Cerbo EHR happening in August, 2023! We push updates out on a rolling basis to clients, so everyone does not get the update at exactly the same time. But everyone will receive the update within a few weeks. When your build is updated, you will see a “You have been updated” notice on your EHR login page.
One thing that you may notice right away is a small change to the top level menu. Specifically, there is a new “Settings” menu at the right in all EHR views. That incorporates and replaces the Preferences menu that previously appeared only when inside an encounter note. And the new Settings menu will soon (but not quite yet) link to an exciting new system settings dashboard where you can control your own preferences for different settings across the EHR. More information on that coming soon.
You can now set discounts to automatically apply to charges based on (1) tags that are added to a patient’s chart and/ or (2) the charge category. This makes it possible to have any number of different billing “tiers”, with different pricing applying to different patients based on their tags and the corresponding auto-discounting rules. Because the auto-discounting rules can also depend on the charge type, you can exempt certain charge categories from auto-discounting or have different discount levels for different types of charges even within the same billing tier.
In a patient’s chart, you can now bulk-apply a discount to multiple estimated charges at once from the expanded billing history (just like you could already do for charges). To do this, check the box to the left of each estimated charge, and select Apply Discount from the Manage Checked drop down menu.
We have fundamentally changed how payments are applied toward charges in a way that will make financial reporting more powerful, flexible, and robust. Previously, payments that were applied toward charges inside an encounter note would in fact apply to the encounter note as a whole – in cases of partial payments, there was no way to designate which encounter note charges to pay. For billing reporting purposes, there was a set logic on the back end to determine in cases of partial payment which encounter charges were paid. This could cause confusion on financial reports where, for example, money that was intended to pay for a patient’s supplements was allocated by the back end logic toward the visit charge. Now, payments can be applied toward specific charges, even if those charges are inside of an encounter note.
In addition to our existing integrations with Stripe and Bluefin for payment processing in Cerbo, we now offer a third option for integrated payment processing: Propelr. The Propelr integration will work very similarly to the current Bluefin integration, offering credit card and ACH/ eCheck processing, recurring billing (subscriptions and payment plans), support for an in-office card processing device, and support for multiple integrated processing accounts within one Cerbo build. To indicate your interest, please fill out the Cerbo + Propelr Interest form and someone from Propelr will contact you.
The Stripe integration can now be set up to work much more like the Bluefin integration. Meaning that clients with the Stripe integration can now use payment plans (automated payments toward one specific charge), and Stripe subscriptions under the new model can be set up as a recurrance of any charge in the Cerbo charge list (versus being set up specifically as defined subscriptions in Stripe or Cerbo). The new version of the Stripe integration also has better logging for being able to investigate any reported issues. If you are a long-time Stripe user that wants to switch from the current Stripe integration to the new model, please reach out to support@cer.bo.
For clinics that sell a large volume of supplements or products, charging and dispensing based on what was recommended in the encounter plan box was previously a more cumbersome process of either right clicking on each one or individually searching for each charge. So we added an option to bulk-add to the encounter note Charges/ Payments box any charges associated with the alternate plan items in the encounter Plan box. This is useful, for example, to add the charge for and dispense from inventory multiple supplements/ products that were prescribed in the Plan.
The clinic charge list under Admin > Manage > Charge List is now searchable by charge category/ type.
You can now push a patient’s submitted questionnaire back into their patient portal as a saved draft, so that they can continue working on it before resubmitting. This is useful when, for example, a patient submits prematurely or later realizes that they want to add more information. Pushing the questionnaire back into the portal is done from the submitted questionnaire in the documents block of the patient’s chart.
Improvements to the Patient Portal to make portals more ADA-compliant.
For multi-location clinics, the upcoming appointment on the patient portal will show the appointment scheduled location.
Users that subscribe to their Cerbo calendar from an external calendar (iPhone, Google Calendar, etc.) may notice that, by default, the information that is synched over does not include the internal appointment notes (which may include PHI). If you use the ical sync and want the appointment notes to be included in the sync, please reach out to Cerbo support.
Resources can now be assigned documents and tasks. This is useful, for example, for managing shared tasks.
When viewing a patient’s structured lab results, you can now export that specific patient’s numeric/ structured results to spreadsheet.
There is now a printable view for an individual patients’ vitals history that includs all of their vitals.
The Practice Documents section, where you can store handouts that you would share with patients as needed, as well as other documents that aren’t specific to one patient, is now searchable.Additionally, when sharing a document or handout with a patient from Practice Documents, the system will now check to see if the same document is already shared with that patient. If so, it will not be re-copied to their chart (which would create duplicates). If it is shared from inside of an encounter note, it will still attach the document that is already in the patient’s documents to that encounter note. Additionally, sharing a document from Practice Documents has been streamlined so that fewer clicks are required.
When viewing a sent fax that was sent as an electronic package, there is now a clickable list of the patient’s documents that were included.
In general, rich text files (RTF) cannot be rendered within the web-browser. So, historically, RTF files would need to be downloaded to view their contents. Cerbo now converts RTF files to PDF on the spot for the purpose of being able to preview and view the file in the browser. The underlying file is not affected, other than by becoming viewable within the web browser/ in Cerbo.
If you use a Chart Part that has supplements or medications associated with it, which have since been deleted, those will be omitted from the “Suggested Actions” that come up when you run the Chart Part
There is now a checkbox at the top of any printable encounter summary to include the date that the encounter was signed, rather than only the encounter’s date of service.
For clinics that document IVs or injections in Cerbo, those can already be set to show in their own tabs in a patient’s Medications/ Supplements block. This makes it simple to see at a glance any IVs or injections that have been added to the encounter plan in the past. With the recent update, we’ve set it so that the added date shows for those past IVs/ injections within the patients Medications/ Supplements block.There was also a fix to the IV total osmolarity calculation so that the total calculation still works even if the ingredient-level osmolarity is 0 for any of the individual listed ingredients.
If a pharmacy is already on the patient’s preferred pharmacies list, routing eRxs to that pharmacy is simple. But in cases where the eRx is being routed to a pharmacy that is not (yet) on the patient’s preferred pharmacy list, we added the option to quickly add it as preferred in the course of routing the eRx, if desired.
If medication dosing includes a partial pill/ unit per dose, or multiple pills/ units per dose, that dosing amount now shows alongside the strength and frequency in the medication block and elsewhere.
Prescribers may not prescribe under their own name/ NPI unless they have a role of “Primary Provider” in their user profile.
You can now unlink a patient from the linked Fullscript account so that if they are mis-matched (for example, the patient chart in Cerbo is linked to a now-defunct profile in Fullscript), you can re-map them to the correct Fullscript profile.
We’ve added additional fields to sync from Cerbo to ActiveCampaign, including the day and month of birth, or just the month of birth (vs. the full DOB), the last and next upcoming appointment date and time (vs. just the date), the date and time of the appointment that is furthest in the future, and the name of the patient’s Bluefin subscription, if any.Additionally, you can now control under Admin > Manage > Integrations which of these fields do or do not sync. And choose to sync just patients’ last initial instead of the full last name.
We have set up new immunization reporting integrations with:
Those with the Apollo ReCODE integration can now receive lab results electronically into Cerbo for tests that are run through Apollo’s system (via Premier Labs).
When sending the order to Quest, the system will now de-duplicate tests/ remove any repeat orders. It will also show a warning if the number of included tests may exceed the order limits on Quest’s side. Even if that warning is shown, all orders are transmitted. But on Quest’s side, the tech will need to manually enter tests that exceed 35 in one transmission, which can increase the potential for errors or missed tests.
We’ve updated the Access Lab integration to incorporate new specimen requirements.
LabCorp electronic sending window now differentiates between codes that are missing from the back-end compendium (e.g., for invalid codes or custom panels that may need to be added by Cerbo) and codes that are discontinued in LabCorp’s systems.
Duplicates are now flagged in the Send to CPL window, with an option to remove duplicate orders.
Sending orders to Vibrant America via the electronic integration no longer requires an insurance-reimbursable diagnosis code. At least one diagnosis code is still required to add the order, but a placeholder/ non-billable diagnosis may be used.
We are currently beta testing our new bi-directional integration with Rupa Health. Given the level of interest in this integration, we will be sending a separate announcement and getting started steps when it’s ready for broader release.
The performance of the Patient Credit Card Report has been improved to work faster for clinics with a large number of patients and a lot of data. And we’ve upgraded the appearance.
Fixed a bug that caused the Inventory Sales Report to be ambiguous for prescription medication inventory.
The notes, if any, on specific charges in patient charts are now included/ shown on the spreadsheet that is generated and downloaded via Reporting > Financial Reports > Export Charges to Excel.
The expiration date, if any, specified for estimated charges that have been added to patient charts now shows on the Estimated Charges Report. Previously, you’d need to look at the Estimated Charges by Expiration for this information.
For clients that use the OPS integration for insurance billing, the Encounter Report found under Reporting > Non-Financial Reports now includes a flag on each encounter to show if it has been synced to OPS.
You can now use the Advanced Patient Search to filter for a subset of patients, and then send that patient list to the Lab Values Tracking spreadsheet export, or the Patient Credit Card Report. That allows you to use the wide range of filters that are available via the Advanced Patient Search to generate those other reports for the desired subset of patients.
There is now a report that you can generate for each pharmacy, laboratory, imaging facility, or specialist that you have in your contact book (in the Admin > Manage menu) to see all patients with that facility as a preferred facility in their chart. This is accessed by going to the relevant listing, for example in Admin > Manage > Specialists/ Other Listings, then clicking on the three dots to the right of a specialist listing, then on the Patient Report option.
We’ve adjusted the default permissions for the Scheduler Only permission profile so that users with that permission set can now run the Advanced Patient Search. *** If you are using this permission profile in your clinic and do NOT want the users with this permission profile to have access to the Advanced Patient Search, reach out to support@cer.bo about adjusting the permission profile for your clinic.
The calendar report (both the print and the export/ download version) now includes any of the patients’ tags that are set to show when scheduling the patient, along with any associated tag notes.
We have added new API endpoints so that developers using the API can now:
We’ve adjusted the API for fetching patient encounters so that the message that is returned will now include an array of appended notes, if there are any notes appended to that encounter.For clinics that had Cerbo import patients, the patient search endpoint can now search by the patient MRN from the previous system.
We are constantly working to improve the speed and responsiveness of our systems. While there are too many performance adjustments to list, this update includes notable performance/ speed improvements in the following areas (which may be especially noticeable for larger clinics):
