Breaking appointments in Open Dental through the process outlined below allows Dental Intelligence to accurately track your Cancellations and No-Shows metrics across Analytics module features.
What's the difference between a cancelled appointment and a missed appointment?
A cancellation is an appointment broken with enough advance notice — more than 24 hours — that the practice has a reasonable chance to fill the slot with another patient.
A missed appointment (no-show) is an appointment broken too late — within 24 hours, including same-day — for the practice to realistically fill the slot.
Enable Broken Appointment Commlog in Open Dental
In order to accurately track appointment status metrics in Analytics dashboards, you must enable the Broken Appointment Commlog setting in Open Dental. To do this:
In Open Dental, navigate to Set up > Appointments > Appts Preferences
Ensure that the Broken Appointment Procedure Types dropdown is set to Both
Ensure that 'Make broken appointment Commlog' is checked
Click OK to save the configuration
How to break appointments as cancelled or missed in Open Dental
Analytics calculates Cancellations and No-Shows metrics based off the time stamp of when the appointment is broken in Open Dental.
Cancelled Appointment | Missed Appointment |
If the appointment is broken in Open Dental more than 24 hours in advance of the scheduled time, it will count towards the Cancellations metric in Analytics. | If the appointment is broken in Open Dental within 24 hours or on the same-day of the scheduled time, it will count towards the No-Shows metric in Analytics. |
Tips for managing broken appointments in your Open Dental schedule
Create a new operatory called "Broken Appointments" (or something similar)
Drag and drop the appointment that has been broken into your Broken Appointment operatory. This allows you to fill that time in the provider operatory with another patient appointment (the original appointment will still show as having been broken on that day)
Right click on the appointment and choose "Break Appointment"
Select either "Missed, leave on appointment book" or "Cancelled - Leave on appointment book" and add the procedure and communication log entry as you see fit