Managing appointment cancellations is part of every practice’s daily tasks.
Bp Premier has some useful features to assist you in managing replacements for cancelled appointments and reducing their impact to your practice with our Waiting list for cancellations functionality. This is built into the appointment book, and as of the Saffron SP 1 release, there have been some further enhancements to this functionality. The benefit of using the cancellation list is that when an appointment is cancelled, you can quickly and easily replace this with another patient who has been added to the list.
There are two ways to add patients to your practice’s cancellation list, they can be added directly to the list, or added when booking an appointment for the future. Let’s explore both of these in some further detail now.
Adding a Patient Directly to the Waiting List
If you are running Saffron SP 1 (released in June 2021) or later, a new feature has been introduced allowing you to add patients directly to your waiting list for cancellations without the need for a future booked appointments. Simply open your practice’s waiting list from the Appointment book > View > Waiting list for cancellations, and click the Add to cancellation list button in the bottom left of the window.
To add this patient to the waiting list, simply:
- Select an existing patient in your database (or add a new patient record)
- Select the provider and location
- Choose the appointment type and length
- And specify the date required by
- Click Add when information is complete.
Once added, this patient will remain on your waiting list for cancellations until the ‘Date required by’ that was specified.
Adding a Patient to the Waiting List When Booking a Future Appointment
In addition to manually adding a patient to the waiting list, you can also add a patient to waiting list at the same time as creating an appointment for the future. When adding the future appointment, after selecting and entering all of the relevant details, there are two checkboxes that you can use:
- ‘Add to the waiting list for cancellation’ to add the appointment to the waiting list
- and ‘Will see any provider for cancellation’ to indicate if the patient is willing to see any provider, not just the doctor that they are booked with, in the event that a cancellation occurs.
Using the Waiting List for Cancellations
Patient appointments that have been added to your practice’s waiting list can be used to quickly replace cancelled appointments. Your practice staff can easily view the contact details for the patients on the waiting list, and immediately fill those vacancies from cancellations. You can view all of the patients on your waiting list at any time from the Appointment book > View > Waiting list for cancellations.
To streamline the process of managing appointment cancellations and save your team even more time, you can set the Patients awaiting cancellations screen to appear whenever an appointment is cancelled. This way, when an appointment is cancelled, your team will immediately a list of patients who may be eligible to replace that appointment, and are able to quickly access their contact information and replace that cancelled appointment. Incorporating this automation to the workflow gives your staff a chance to review the waiting list and fill in the available timeslots as soon as they are made available.
You can configure the automatic display of the cancellation list by completing the following steps:
- Select Setup > Configuration from the main Bp Premier screen.
- Select the Appointments tab.
- Tick the Show Cancellation list when an appointment is cancelled
In summary, the waiting list for cancellations is a fantastic tool that may help to fill vacant appointment slots when managing appointment cancellations, and can quickly provide you and your team the necessary information to allow you to do so. If you are interested in learning, access the Knowledge Base (Help>Online in Bp Premier), and search for ‘waiting list’.
Authored by:
Bec Bland
Training & Deployment Leader at Best Practice Software
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