Plenty of Cerbo practices tell us their EHR can't run video visits. That's wrong. Cerbo ships a native video module.
It's web-based, HIPAA-compliant, and sits beside the open chart. You ask billing to turn it on, and it costs extra, because Cerbo pays by the minute per person on the call.
So the video isn't missing. The delivery is.
Check the "Is Telemedicine" box on an appointment and Cerbo drops the meeting link into the first email notice. It also attaches an iCal file.
A patient who books a protocol recheck six weeks out gets that link in early April for a visit in late May. By then it sits under 400 other emails.
Cerbo's help article says the quiet part plainly. Skip the notices and reminders, and you'll need to get the conference link to the patient some other way.
That "some other way" is the whole problem. It's also why so many practices bolt on a second video tool and mail out links by hand.
Our stance is blunt. For a spread-out functional medicine panel, the video vendor matters far less than the message that carries the link. A patient who can't find the link doesn't show up.
The codec is irrelevant. Attendance is a messaging problem in a technology costume.
We'll cover what Cerbo really provides, where patients fall out, and what changes when the visit runs from the same text thread that already confirms appointments.
Cerbo's published behavior anchors the first part. Our client data anchors the rest, including one clinic that confirms more than 1,100 appointments a month by text.
Cerbo lists four paths for practices that want video. The native module runs in a browser, needs no install on either side, and shows the call next to the patient's chart.
A light Doxy.me setup embeds your waiting room link in the patient portal.There's a Zoom option too. And Cerbo says outright that you can run any outside video program side by side with the EHR.
That last one gets picked more often than vendors admit. The native module bills extra, since Cerbo absorbs per-minute, per-person video costs.
Add a third or fourth person to a call and the cost per provider climbs again. That stings for family sessions, or when a health coach joins.
|
Cerbo video option |
How the patient gets in |
Extra cost |
|
Native video module |
Link in the booking email and iCal file |
Yes, per minute per person |
|
Doxy.me embed |
Waiting room link inside the patient portal |
Doxy.me subscription |
|
Zoom |
Zoom link, wherever staff paste it |
Zoom subscription |
|
Any outside tool, side by side |
Whatever staff email or text by hand |
That vendor's fee |
Tick the "Is Telemedicine" box and Cerbo does something useful. Meeting details drop into the first email notice. An iCal file goes with it, so the visit lands on the patient's calendar. Useful, and badly timed.
Functional medicine books far ahead. Six-week protocol rechecks, three-month lab reviews, and quarterly DPC touchpoints all get scheduled months out. Each one sends its link on the day of booking, then lets it age.
Cerbo's documentation names the gap. Turn off notices and reminders, and you have to supply the conference link another way.
Most practices solve that by having someone re-send it the morning of the visit. That's a manual task with a hard deadline, sitting in the same queue as refill requests and lab callbacks.
Watch the sequence in a practice running Zoom beside Cerbo. Staff book the visit in Cerbo, then open the other platform and create a meeting. They copy the link, pull up the chart for an email address, and paste it into a message.
Then they hope.
Impromptu calls add a trap. In Cerbo's native module, the link for an unscheduled call won't work until someone clicks "Start Impromptu Meeting Invitation."
Send it early and the patient taps a dead link. They call the front desk. Now two people are troubleshooting instead of one.
Sixty-minute consults shrink under all this. Five minutes of "can you hear me" and "which link" turns a 60-minute slot into 48 minutes of clinical work. Run four virtual visits a day and you've donated most of an hour.
Two of Cerbo's four video paths route through the patient portal. The Doxy.me embed puts your waiting room link inside it. Portal messages carry the notice for practices leaning that direction.
Portal adoption is where this breaks. Every practice has a stack of patients who got a signup email, meant to finish it, and never did.
Those patients still book. They still take supplements and still need protocol adjustments. They just don't have a working portal login.
Ask your front desk how many password resets they walked someone through last month. That number is your real portal adoption rate, not the one in your dashboard.
Remote patients aren't a side segment for integrative and DPC practices. They often are the panel. Draw from a 90-mile radius and half your follow-ups have to be virtual.
Telehealth use is broad now. The AMA found that 71.4% of physicians reported telehealth in their practices in 2024, up from 25.1% in 2018. Availability stopped being the limit. Access didn't.
A national survey of US adults published in JMIR sharpens the picture. Among adults who hadn't used telehealth, 63% said their provider didn't offer it. Among those who had, 80.5% hit no technical trouble at all.
Tools work once patients reach them. Reaching them is the failure point.
Vendor fees are the visible number. Add the second subscription, then the per-minute charges. Staff minutes spent re-sending links belong in the total too, along with the 12 minutes shaved off every consult.
Then count the visits that never happened, because a patient couldn't find an email from six weeks back. No one bills for those. No report shows them. They surface only as a schedule that looks lighter than it should and a protocol that stalled at week eight.
A practice sophisticated enough to run remote protocol monitoring, order 50-plus lab panels, and track supplement compliance is taping consumer video software onto a clinical workflow. That gap should bother you more than the invoice does.
Text messages get opened at rates email can't touch. Portal messages sit lower still. That gap is the whole argument for moving the visit link out of the inbox.
Curogram runs telemedicine without app download steps of any kind. A text lands a few minutes before the visit. The patient taps the link.
Video opens in the phone's browser. There's no app store trip, no username, and no password reset at 1:58 PM.
Sessions are encrypted and HIPAA-compliant. They work from a phone, tablet, or desktop. A 71-year-old patient who never activated your portal can still join, because there's nothing to activate.
Clinically, nothing shifts. You chart the encounter in Cerbo. You keep place of service code 02 on the invoice. Your virtual encounter types stay exactly as you configured them, including the ones you built so reminder text reads differently for virtual visits.
Front desk work is the first thing to shift. Nobody generates a meeting room, nobody copies a link into an email, and nobody fields the 2:04 PM call asking where the visit is.
Provider work barely moves. You open the visit from Curogram, then document in Cerbo the way you always have.
Patient work drops close to zero. They read a text they were going to read anyway and tap once.
Curogram pulls your virtual appointments from the EHR schedule and drops the video link into the reminder it already sends. Nobody distributes links by hand anymore.
Sequence is the point. In a two-tool setup, a reminder fires from one system while the link waits in another, sent weeks apart through two channels. Merge them and the message that cuts no-shows becomes the message that starts the visit.
Morning prep disappears too. No one opens a second platform at 8:40 AM to spin up meeting rooms for the day's schedule.
Reschedules get easier as well. A patient who replies "can't make Thursday" is answered in the thread, rebooked in Cerbo, and re-linked automatically when the new reminder fires. Under the old setup, that same reschedule meant killing one meeting room, creating another, and emailing a fresh link that may or may not get read.
Trace what a single thread carries for one visit. Intake and consent go out early as secure online forms. The reminder arrives with the video link inside it.
After the call, the balance goes out as a text-to-pay charge. A day later, the review request follows.
One thread. One phone number. The same conversation the patient has had with your office since their first appointment.
When they reply "can we push to Thursday," your front desk reads it in that same window. No portal message queue, no voicemail, no separate video vendor dashboard to check.
Functional medicine remote consultations skew short and frequent, which is the worst possible shape for a high-friction setup. Supplement follow-up telehealth visits often need 12 minutes: check tolerance, adjust the dose, answer one question about timing with food.
Lab reviews run the same way. Share results, explain two markers, set the next protocol step. Nobody needs a 45-minute room for that.
A DPC virtual visit platform faces identical math. Membership models depend on frequent, low-stakes contact. Charge the patient five minutes of setup for a two-minute question and they'll skip it, then bring it up three months later when it's harder to fix.
Practices tend to price telehealth by subscription. Price it by taps instead and the ranking changes.
A portal login runs roughly six taps: open email, tap link, enter username, enter password, reset password, re-enter. A text link is one.
Every tap between those two numbers is a place to quit, and nobody calls the office to report that they gave up. The visit just shows as a no-show, which is the least useful label your schedule could give it.
Multiply six taps by a panel where a third of patients never finished portal signup. That's the population your virtual schedule is quietly capped at.
Take a common visit shape. A patient started a methylation protocol eight weeks ago and needs a 15-minute check before the next lab draw. The full path looks like this.
|
When |
What happens |
Who does it |
|
8 weeks out |
Recheck booked in Cerbo, marked virtual |
Front desk |
|
48 hours out |
Text reminder with confirm or reschedule reply |
Automated |
|
10 min before |
Text arrives carrying the video link |
Automated |
|
Visit time |
Patient taps link, video opens in browser |
Patient |
|
15 min |
Dose adjusted, encounter charted in Cerbo |
Provider |
|
Right after |
Text-to-pay charge sent to the same thread |
Automated |
|
Next day |
Review request sent to the same thread |
Automated |
Count the staff touches. One, at booking. Everything after runs off the schedule Cerbo already holds.
Compare that to the same visit with a side-by-side tool. Booking, then meeting creation, then a copy-paste email, then a morning-of re-send, then a "can you resend the link" call at 2:04 PM. Five touches, four of them avoidable.
Notice which step disappeared entirely. Nobody re-sends anything the morning of, because the link doesn't exist until 10 minutes before the visit and it goes out on its own.
Based on our internal data, Covina Arthritic Clinic confirms more than 1,100 appointments a month through automated text confirmations.
Staff stopped working a call list to get there. Across Curogram clients, the average confirmation rate runs above 75%.
Attendance moves with it. Atlas Medical Center cut no-shows from 14.20% to 4.91% inside three months of switching on automated reminders, based on our internal research. That's roughly three times better than the industry average.
Those figures come from appointment confirmation, not from video. Sit with that for a second. The same delivery path that gets patients to show up in person is the one that should be carrying your video link, and in most Cerbo practices it isn't.
Easy Telemedicine is Curogram's HIPAA-compliant video visit tool. It starts from a text link, not a portal and not an app.
What it does for a Cerbo practice is narrow and specific. Curogram connects to your Cerbo schedule and pulls virtual appointments on its own. Before each one, the patient gets a text with a secure link tied to that appointment and that time slot.
They tap it. Video opens in their phone's browser.
Sessions are encrypted and covered under Curogram's business associate agreement. Patients join from any device with a camera and a current browser, which in practice means any phone bought in the last decade.
Your side stays inside the tools you know. Start the visit from Curogram. Chart the encounter in Cerbo. Apply your virtual encounter type and place of service code 02 as always.
What changes is the number of places a patient can get lost. One thread carries the intake form, the reminder, the video link, the payment request, and the review ask.
Staff manage no second login. Nobody generates meeting rooms each morning, and no one hunts for an email sent six weeks ago.
For practices already using Curogram for two-way texting and reminders, adding video introduces nothing new on the patient side. The link just appears in the conversation they're already having with your office.
Staff training runs short for the same reason. The workflow mirrors texting, which your front desk already does all day, so there's no separate video console to learn and no daily setup routine to remember.
Cerbo does the hard part well. It holds the chart, the labs, the protocols, and the encounter note. Video sits right beside all of it, if you pay for the module.
What Cerbo can't control is the moment a patient decides whether joining is worth the trouble. That moment happens on a phone, in whatever inbox the link landed in, about 90 seconds before the visit.
Virtual visits get lost in those 90 seconds. Not to bad medicine, and not to bad software. To an email sent six weeks earlier and a login nobody remembers making.
Retire the link graveyard. Put the visit where the reminder already lives, in a thread the patient reads without thinking about it.
Cerbo keeps your clinical encounter. Curogram delivers the patient's doorway to it.
Book a demo and watch one appointment travel the full path: reminder, video visit, payment, review, all in one thread. We'll run it against your real appointment types and show you exactly which manual steps go away.