Breaking appointments in Dentrix 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.
How to break appointments as cancelled or missed in Dentrix
In order to accurately track appointment status metrics in Analytics dashboards, you must break the appointments correctly within Dentrix. Analytics calculates these metrics based off the time stamp of when the appointment is broken in Dentrix.
Cancelled Appointment | Missed Appointment |
If the appointment is broken in Dentrix 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 Dentrix within 24 hours or on the same-day of the scheduled time, it will count towards the No-Shows metric in Analytics. |
⚠️ Important notes:
If you remove appointments that have been broken from the Unscheduled List in Dentrix, they won't show up in the Cancellations or No Shows metrics in Analytics dashboards.
New patients may not appear in the No-Show metric: Dentrix lets you schedule appointments without linking them to a full patient record — sometimes only a name is entered. If that link is missing, the appointment won't show up correctly in the No-Show metric. To help, always enter the patient's name on the appointment rather than leaving it blank. Note that even with a name entered, you won't be able to click through to a Patient Card from the No-Show source data, since there's still no linked record to reference.