Notify patients when an appointment is cancelled

Updates & Changes
#1

You can now notify patients of cancelled appointments! :spiral_calendar: :inbox_tray:

Similar to appointment confirmation emails, you have the option to automatically send an email to the patient when their appointment is cancelled. You can set these up with the new cancellation email templates in your account. It’s a totally optional feature, so there’s no requirement to use it, but if you want your patients to receive a notification of their cancelled appointment, then this should definitely help.

To set it up, head into Settings, and then Appointment cancellations:

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You’ll be able to create a new cancellation template, or use the default “standard cancellation notice” that’s included in your account:

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You’ll then be able to set up your unique appointment cancellation template! We have a guide that walks you through the steps here. Once that’s done, your next step will be to head into your appointment types and link the cancellation template(s) with each relevant appointment type. Within the appointment type settings, you’ll see an area for “Booking cancellation email”. From there, you can select the appropriate template:

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Save your settings, and you’ll be all set!

If you don’t see what you’re after, we recommend double-checking that the template has indeed been set up as a cancellation template, and not a reminder or confirmation template.

There are a few things to keep in mind with appointment cancellations!

  • If None is selected, it means no cancellation email will be sent whatsoever for this appointment type.
  • Cancellations will only ever be emailed. There isn’t currently an SMS cancellation setting within Cliniko.
  • Patients will only get cancellation emails if they have an email address on file, and don’t have a custom communication preference set up to specifically not receive cancellation emails.
  • By default, every patient who is set to receive confirmation e-mails will also be set to receive cancellation e-mails.
  • Previous and new appointment types do not have a default cancellation template set-up. You’ll need to edit your appointment type settings to assign a cancellation template.
  • Cancellation emails will go out immediately after an appointment is cancelled, regardless of who cancelled it (the patient, or a member of your staff).

As always, if you have any questions about how this works, our support team is here to help!

4 Likes
#2
#3
#4

This is great! Related to this I’d still like to request a reschedule option as we have booking deposits so atm pple need to cancel and email us to reschedule instead of just being able to do it themselves.

3 Likes
#5

Hoping an SMS option will be added too? :crossed_fingers:

1 Like
#6

If we leave this set to (None) because we don’t want to automatically email every cancellation, is there an option to send one by going in to the booking and sending manually ie a tick box to send a single one only?

1 Like
#7

Great question, @angiemo ! If you leave the cancellation communication template set to “None”, you could send the cancellation email manually by sending a Letter. Your Letter Template can be customized via Settings → Letter Templates so you could also closely mirror your cancellation templates if needed.

If you want to send an SMS though, you could send a manual SMS communication to your patient but the message would have to be added manually as well. As @ClaireM also mentioned, we may add an SMS cancellation template option in the future.

1 Like
#8

@rachel Keeping my fingers cross for that SMS version… :wink:
One other request: when new features like this are released it’s a bit of a pain to have to go into each Appointment Type individually (we have close to 100 types) to add the new message template, and it’s easy to lose track of which ones we have updated. It would be great if we could do this the opposite way around i.e. select the appointment types to add from the message template. Hope that makes sense!

2 Likes
#9

Will there be an option to notify the practitioner of any cancellations so that they can follow up with a client who has not rebooked if required?

1 Like
#10

They still get an email and SMS if it is set up in their practitioner settings that they receive cancellation messages. You can set it to the number of days pre-appointment.

1 Like