How to reschedule/cancel an appointment

There are multiple ways to change an appointment, and Core Practice has simplified these processes. You will find that once you understand the concepts behind them, it will make your time on the front desk much easier. This guide will outline the following:

1. Rescheduling an appointment
2. Cancelling an appointment
3. Rescheduling a patient's appointment after having cancelled it

Concept

There are two options when cancelling an appointment; "Failed to attend" (FTA) and "Unable to attend" (UTA). Usually, FTA is used when the patient has called to change their appointment time with less than 24 hours' notice. UTA is typically used when the patient cannot attend their appointment due to a fault of the clinic, such as a provider taking late-notice sick leave.

For the sake of the article, when a patient has called to change their appointment time with more than 24 hours' notice, we will refer to it as "rescheduling". In this case, I would suggest that you simply do not select an option; leave it blank but provide a brief note to explain the reason for rescheduling the appointment and that they provided more than 24 hours' notice for rescheduling their appointment. This is more as a record to keep your team up to date.

Obviously, your company policy may differ so check with management as to your specific business rules.

Rescheduling appointments

1. From the appointment block, click on the Calendar icon then Reschedule Appointment or click the Reschedule button.                         
   
   
2. Find a suitable space for the patient's new appointment and click Reschedule Appointment.            
   
   The original appointment will be deleted when using this method. You will not need to enter an FTA/UTA marker in this case. If you would like to create an FTA/UTA marker for this appointment before rescheduling, follow the process below.

Cancelling appointments

1. Click on the appointment that you want to cancel, and then click on the red "x".
   
   
   
   
2. Select Failed To Attend or Unable To Attend, add a note and then click Cancel Appointment.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Every time that you go to the patient's profile or you're making an appointment, you can see the FTA counter (seen below). This is useful because it gives you the opportunity to advise the patient if they have too many FTAs.                                                                                                         
   
   

Rescheduling a patient's appointment after having cancelled it

If the patient would like to make another appointment after cancelling their previous one, here's what you should do.

1. Click on Show Cancelled at the top of the appointment books.                                                             
   
   
   
   
2. Click the Calendar icon, and then click Create another appointment.                                                 
   
   
   
   
3. Find a suitable space for the patient's new appointment and click Create Appointment.                       
   
   

Now that you know how to reschedule appointments, learn about other advanced appointment features which may help to improve your time when making appointments.