Appointment cancellations and no-shows are frustrating for any allied healthcare practice. They cause practitioners and administration staff to spend extra time rescheduling, moving appointments around and contacting waitlists. They also impact billables and can reduce your practice income. As these are common issues practices face every day, we have created this guide to share some helpful ways to reduce appointment cancellations.

This article includes the following:

1. SMS and Email reminder templates

2. Reports

3. Appointment alert

4. Client file reminder

5. Telehealth

6. Charge cancellation fee for online bookings

coreplus users generally use SMS and Email reminder templates to remind their clients about their upcoming appointments.

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💎 Did you know you could use these templates to help reduce cancellations of appointments too?

Depending on your policy, you can add a line at the end of the template saying that a cancellation fee may apply if the client cancels the appointment. You can also instruct them to cancel a certain amount of time before the appointment so that you have enough time to book another client.

On the template page, you can select how many hours before the appointment the reminder will be sent. You can increase this and set it to 48 or 72 hours so that the client receives the reminder in advance and can cancel earlier, giving you enough time to fill the slot with another client.

Our articles about SMS reminder template and Email reminder template will guide you through the whole process.

You can use the Statistics and Cancellation reports to keep track of appointment cancellations on your account.

The Statistics report will show which clients have cancelled their appointments and didn't reschedule within the date range you selected. This way, you can identify these clients and pay extra attention to future bookings.

The Cancellation report shows you all the clients that have cancelled their appointments within your chosen date range along with client details and reason for cancellation. With this report, you can keep track of the most common reasons clients cancel their appointments and take action if required.

Our article on the Statistics report and the Cancellation report will help you along this process.

🛑 You must mark the appointments as Cancelled for them to show up in the reports.

You can create appointment alerts on a client's file that will pop up whenever you create a new appointment.

By creating an appointment alert on a client's file, you can make yourself and any other staff aware that the client has cancelled prior.

This way, you can give special attention to the client's booked appointments and take the necessary steps.

Here is our help centre article on Creating an appointment alert

Similar to Appointment alerts, you can add a client file reminder to a client who has cancelled prior. This reminder will pop up when you or another user open the client's file.

This will help you improve this client's management to ensure they don't cancel in the future.

Our Create a client file reminder article is here to explain the steps to set it up.

With Covid, it's very common that clients have to cancel their appointments on short notice. Did you know you can still go ahead and have the appointment using Telehealth by coreplus?

Telehealth allows you to hold video conferences with your client from anywhere in the world. So even if the client is sick or travelling away to a different location, they can still make the appointment via telehealth instead of cancelling. Telehealth can be instrumental in reducing cancellations for your practice.

To get started with Telehealth by coreplus, please visit Getting started with Telehealth by coreplus

It can be very frustrating when a client makes a booking online then cancels it on short notice or no-show, making it difficult to seek compensation. With our Pin Payments add-on, you can now request the credit card details of clients at the time of booking.

The Pin Payments add-on allows you to add a field called 'Credit Card' in the booking form of your client portal. You can make this field mandatory so that whenever a client books an appointment via the client portal, they'll have to enter their credit card details, which you can later charge if they cancel on short notice.

Please, see here how to take cancellation fee for bookings via the Client Portal

You may also be interested in the following:

📝 Features of Telehealth by coreplus
📝 Cancel, no show, or delete an appointment
📝 Scheduling client appointment reminders