Cancellations and No-Shows will ruin profitability faster than most any other problem. By minimizing these two issues, you will preserve margin and reach break even much faster. High cancellation percentages can be reduced by helping the patients understand how important this appointment time is immediately after scheduling the appointment.
Cancellations and No Shows are two different metrics found on your performance board. In this article, we will explain why both of these metrics are important to your practice.
Note: These metrics are calculated retroactively, meaning that Dental Intelligence uses historical data in order to determine the current outcomes.
Data Review Tools
Use the icons located on each of the metric graphs to get more information about that metric.
Click into the trends icon to view view year over year and 90 day trends for your practice
Click on the magnifying glass icon to view the details of the source data that included in that metric
The information icon will give you additional information about this metric
Cancellations
Cancellations happen when a patient lets you know more than 24 hours in advance that they can’t make it. Even though it’s still a broken appointment, some offices just reschedule it without marking it as canceled. This can hide the real issue of how often appointments are getting broken. By tracking these cancellations, we can see if they’re becoming more frequent and figure out why.
Watch this short video for a walkthrough of how to use this metric:
Cancellations Data Points
Cancellations: The percentage of patient appointments which were broken more than 24 hours before their appointment.
Scheduled: The number of scheduled appointments that are on your schedule. This number will match the number of appointments in the Appointments metric.
Cancelled: The number of appointments that were classified as a Cancellation. Appointments are classified as a Cancellation if they are broken more than 24 hours before the appointment time.
Unscheduled: the number of patients who had Cancellations during this time period and are still unscheduled.
No Shows
No-shows are a real headache. These are the patients who either don’t show up at all or give us less than 24 hours notice. Whether they call three hours before or not at all, it throws your whole schedule off and stresses out the team as you scramble to fill that spot. Tracking these no-shows (including those last-minute cancellations) helps us spot trends and understand what’s going on.
Why does Dental Intelligence lump together the true no-shows and the late cancellations? The reason is that the impact on the office is almost the same: an unexpected gap in the schedule. By tracking both, we get a clearer picture of where we need to improve. It’s not about blaming patients but about figuring out how we can reduce these disruptions. Whether they call late or don’t call at all, we need to address the behavior to keep things running smoothly.
Watch this short video for a walkthrough of how to use this metric:
No-Shows Data Points
No-Show %: The percentage of appointments broken less than 24 hours prior to the scheduled time of the appointment
Scheduled: The number of scheduled appointments that are on your schedule. This number will match the number of appointments in the Appointments metric.
No-Shows: The number of appointments that were classified as a No-Show. Appointments are classified as a No-Show if they are broken less than 24 hours before the appointment time
Unscheduled: the number of patients who had No-Shows during this time period and are still unscheduled
If you only want to track no-shows as appointments that no-show/cancel, add D9986 or D9987 to the ledger of the patient on the same day as the appointment is broken. D9986 or D9987 will override DI logic
A note for Dentrix users:
Why are new patients not showing up in the No-Show metric?
Dentrix allows you to make appointments without connecting them to a patient's full record, so sometimes only basic info like the patient's name is used. The appointments with missing patient names in the data are cases where the appointment has not been linked to a full patient record.
One solution is to include the patient’s name in the appointment record for the cases where it is not linked to a patient instead of leaving it empty. However, you will not being able to click the patient’s name in the No-Show metric source data to open the Patient Card because we don’t have an exact reference to the patient.
How to Break Appointments in Your Practice Management Software
Refer to the following articles to learn how to break appointments within your Practice Management Software so Dental Intelligence can accurately track your Cancellations and No-Shows: