Identifying short notice cancellations currently relies on users selecting that option as a cancellation reason, this leaves room for error and recording the genuine cancellation reason in some cases might be better suited to the patients and hold a better explanation for the cancel rather than being used to flag the short notice cancel.
I would like to feature request, as I am hoping for an automatic short notice cancellation flag, that is separate to appointment reason? I was thinking a field in settings where the practice cancellation policy time frame can be logged (usually 24 or 48 hours) For example a practice then set their policy at 48 hours, and the system then flags any cancels in that time frame as a short notice cancel regardless of appointment reason, and this could then be reported on within the appointments report.
This would allow a practice to see top level information around how many cancellations are potentially negatively Impacting their chair time. This would also mean a clearer understanding of why a patient might have cancelled their appointment as the appointment reason would then be used for the accurate situation.
Some practices have a high cancellation rate, but the reality is that, if they are pre-booking patients in advance as recommend they might have more patients contacting with plenty of time to reschedule and this is okay, whilst this does equate to a higher cancellation rate it doesn’t result in wasted chair time. So to be able to differentiate between the cancels that have a negative impact and the ones that don’t would allow users to have a better understanding of how best to focus their time to reduce the cancellation rate and support their patients. This would also provide a clearer understanding of why patients might be cancelling at such short notice as their genuine reasons would be recorded.
