Guide
Reach patients anywhere with secure video consultations, screen sharing, and integrated clinical documentation.
Enable telemedicine for your practice and configure preferences for video consultations.
Telemedicine extends your reach beyond the walls of your clinic. For practices across Africa — where patients may travel hours to see a specialist — virtual consultations dramatically improve access to care. Cari's telemedicine is built for the realities of the continent: it works on low bandwidth, runs in the browser with no app install required, and integrates directly with your EHR.
Go to Settings → Services and toggle on Telemedicine. This adds a "Video Consultation" appointment type to your scheduling options and enables the virtual waiting room feature.
Set your default video consultation duration, maximum concurrent sessions, and whether patients need to pre-pay before joining. You can also configure automatic bandwidth detection — if the connection is too slow for video, Cari seamlessly downgrades to audio-only with the option to share images via chat.
Duration
Default call length
Concurrent
Max parallel sessions
Pre-payment
Require before join
Bandwidth
Auto-detect quality
Waiting Room
Hold before admit
Recording
Consent-based capture
Use the Test Call feature to verify your camera, microphone, and internet connection. Cari checks audio quality, video resolution, and latency, then provides recommendations if anything needs adjustment. Run a test call from the same device and location you plan to use for patient consultations.
Run a test call weekly to catch hardware or network issues before they affect patient appointments. The test takes less than 30 seconds.
Both provider and patient join through simple, browser-based interfaces with no app required.
Fifteen minutes before the appointment, Cari sends the patient an SMS and email with a unique, secure join link. The patient clicks the link, grants camera and microphone permissions in their browser, and enters the virtual waiting room. No app download, no account creation — just a single click from their phone.
From your dashboard, click on the telemedicine appointment and select Start Video Call. Cari opens the video interface in a side panel alongside the patient's clinical record. You can see the patient's chart — allergies, medications, past visits — while speaking with them face to face.
When the patient is in the waiting room, you will see a notification. Click Admit to begin the consultation. The call timer starts, and the session is automatically linked to the patient's encounter record for documentation and billing purposes.
If the patient does not join within 15 minutes of the scheduled time, Cari marks the appointment as a no-show and releases the slot. The patient receives a message with options to rebook.
Use screen sharing, in-call chat, and live note-taking to make virtual visits as rich as in-person.
Click the Share Screen button to show the patient their lab results, imaging studies, or educational materials. This is particularly useful for explaining test results, walking through a treatment plan, or showing medication instructions. You can share your full screen, a specific application window, or a browser tab.
The built-in chat panel lets you exchange text messages and images during the call. Patients can use this to share photos of symptoms — a skin rash, a wound, or a medication label — that are difficult to capture clearly on video. These images are saved to the encounter record automatically.
Ask patients to have good lighting and to hold their phone steady when sharing photos of symptoms. Close-up images with natural light produce the most clinically useful photos.
While on the call, you can document the encounter using the same SOAP note interface available for in-person visits. The clinical record panel sits alongside the video feed so you can type or dictate notes without leaving the consultation screen. Everything you document is saved in real time, so nothing is lost if the connection drops.
Finalize documentation, send prescriptions, and generate patient-friendly summaries.
Review and finalize your SOAP note. If you used voice dictation during the call, review the AI-extracted entities — diagnoses, prescriptions, and action items — and commit them to the patient record. The encounter note records the consultation type as "Telemedicine" for audit and billing purposes.
Any prescriptions written during the call can be sent electronically to the patient's preferred pharmacy or delivered as a PDF via SMS and email. Patient instructions, follow-up appointments, and care plans are also sent automatically. The patient can access all of this from their patient portal at any time.
Cari generates a patient-friendly summary of the consultation in plain language — what was discussed, what was prescribed, and what to do next. This summary is sent to the patient and serves as a reference between visits. For patients in areas with limited literacy, the summary can be generated as an audio message in the patient's preferred language.
Telemedicine encounters are billed the same way as in-person visits. The encounter type is automatically set to "Telemedicine" so claims are submitted with the correct service codes.
Telemedicine on Cari is designed to deliver the same quality of care as an in-person visit, with the added benefit of reaching patients wherever they are — whether that is across the city or in a rural community hundreds of kilometres from the nearest specialist.