Overview

In Cerbo, you can prescribe supplements, IVs, injections, nutritional or movement recommendations, even informational videos using Alternate Plan Options.


Alternate Plan Options - Webinar May 2021 from Cerbo EHR on Vimeo.


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Details

Alternate Plan Options in Cerbo include supplements, as well as any custom categories of prescribable items that you add. That can include:

  • IV Infusions or injections
  • Nutritional or dietary recommendations
  • Movement or lifestyle recommendations
  • Informational/ educational videos
  • Follow up recommendations indicating when the patient should next be seen
  • Recommended books, websites, or products, including products that you sell out of your inventory


What are alternate plan items good for? Anything that you regularly want to recommend to patients. You save the default text/ settings associated with the Alternate Plan item, and can tailor that to each individual patient when assigning it to them.


Note that Alternate Plan items are NOT meant to be used for:

  • Specialty or compounded medications. Those should be added under Admin > Manage > Medications, so that they have all the attributes of medications, and can be e-prescribed.
  • Specialty lab orders, which should be added under Admin > Manage > Orders/ Labs Database.
  • Text that must be formatted in a specific way, for example with tables or inline images. For that, you would use Handouts. You can have alternate plan items that correspond with handouts, and even tie those together using Chart Parts to add the alternate plan item AND the handout as "suggested actions" in your encounter note.


Supplements

Adding Supplements to your Alternate Plan Options

Cerbo comes pre-loaded with a generic/ non-branded prescribable supplements list. And you can add other supplements:

  • Manually under Admin > Manage > Alternate Plan Options.
  • Via spreadsheet import from a spreadsheet that you send to [email protected] for importing. If you carry supplements in inventory and want those imported to your prescribable supplements list, charge list, and inventory, you can ask us for a template spreadsheet that shows the columns we're looking for to import that information.
  • From an external supplement dispensary that's integrated with your Cerbo build (like Fullscript, Wellevate, or Wholescripts). The importing tool for this is found under the applicable integration under Admin > Manage > Integrations. 
    • We strongly recommend being selective when importing from an external supplement dispensary. Having too many options in Cerbo will cause confusion and wasted time with every prescription. 
    • Also note that if you already have the same supplements in your alternate plan items list, importing them from an integrated dispensary will create duplicates (potentially without the additional dosing information or instructions you've already added to supplements in your supplements list).


Prescribing Supplements to Patients

You can prescribe supplements to patients:

  • Individually in an encounter note, by hovering over the Plan box and clicking Add Supplement.
  • In an encounter note, with other supplements and/ or other recommendations, diagnoses, charges, etc., using Chart Parts.
  • To the text body of the encounter note as well as the Plan box by typing ap_ followed by supplement search terms in the main text body of the note, and selecting the desired supplement from the suggested matches. See Quick Add.
  • Directly to the Supplements block in the patient's chart, by clicking on the plus sign at the top right, and searching for the supplement to add.
  • Directly in the Supplement Plan Manager.


The supplement dosing window allows you to add prescribing details, including an "Expanded Regimen" detailing when during the day the supplement should be taken. You can save one or more supplement dosing profiles to quickly and easily populate detailed dosing information in the future.


Expires (Days):

  • If the Expires (Days) field is left blank, the supplement prescription never expires. 
  • If a number is specified, checking "Warn me when this dosing expires" will create a Follow Up Task for the prescriber when the dosing expires.


"Is Administrative Record" is used to indicate supplements that are patient-reported, rather than prescribed by the clinic.


IV Infusions, Injections and Pellets

Alternate Plan Options can also be used for ordering/ recommending IV Infusions, Injections and Pellets. These items include specialty ordering modules for dosing and protocol tracking.


General Free Text Recommendations

If you have nutritional, movement, lifestyle, follow up, or any other type of custom recommendation that you want to have available to quickly prescribe to patients, you can use Alternate Plan Options for this.


You can create any types/ categories of prescribable Alternate Plan Option that you want. As well as individual custom recommendations within each type/ category. For example, you could create a category of Nutrition, and within that category have different nutritional recommendations that you commonly give. For example, you could "prescribe":

  • An Anti-Inflammatory Diet, Intuitive Eating, Intermittent Fasting, etc.
  • Meditation
  • Sleep Hygiene best practices
  • Exercises or stretches


Basically, any custom recommendations that you want to have available to quickly prescribe to patients! The recommendations that you add will have a name, a category/ type, and a Description/ free text area for the recommendation itself. When you're prescribing it to the patient, the default description pulls into the body of the recommendation, but you can tailor it to the specific patient at that time.


Follow Up Recommendations are one category of general free text recommendation that you can create to quickly and clearly communicate to the patient and front desk when the patient should come back in, and for what service. If you want to use this category, you could would decide if the items within the Follow Up category should be the return intervals (e.g., 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, etc.), with details in the Description. Or if they should be the recommended service(s), with details about the recommended timing to be added in the Description.


Video Resources

If you have educational or informational videos that you want to share with patients, you can do that with alternate plan options as well! Note this is NOT suitable for videos that contain PHI, as major video hosting sites don't offer HIPAA-compliant options. 


First, you would post the videos that you want to share to Vimeo, Loom, or YouTube. And ask us at [email protected] to enable Video Resources for you. Then you would add a new category to your Alternate Plan Options called Video Resources, with a each video being a separate prescribable item. The title/ name of the video would be the alternate plan option name. And the link to the video would go in the Description field.


To "prescribe" a video to a patient, you would add the corresponding alternate plan recommendation to the Plan of their encounter note. For more information, see Sharing Video Education with Patients.


Other keywords: diet, recall, tinctures, followup, yoga, paleo, keto