INTRODUCTION
Cancelled appointments are the persona non-grata of the schedule. Often ignored for their more popular sibling, “no-shows”, best practices on cancellations are rare and often a copy and paste from best practices on no-shows. Cancellations are even implicitly ignored by practice management systems. Pulling a no-show report is quite easy, but have you ever tried to pull a report on the percentage of cancellations filled? Still, many practices realize cancellations are a problem, but because the data isn’t readily available do not realize how large a problem they are nor what to do about them. That’s why we wanted to share the knowledge we’ve gained analyzing over 170,000 cancelled appointments for practices across the US.