2 Ways to Cancel or Reschedule an Appointment

How you deal with appointment cancellations can vary based on the situation. 

When patients come to the front desk following an appointment, they often will schedule their next appointment. But because that appointment can be six months or more in the future, they may at some point between now and then have the need to cancel or reschedule that appointment. Dentrix can handle appointment cancellations in different ways based on the situation. Here are two different ways to cancel or reschedule an appointment and my thoughts on when it’s appropriate to use them.

Breaking an Appointment

Breaking an appointment is what I consider to be a negative cancellation–if the patient is a no-show or cancels within 24 hours of the appointment. Each time an appointment is broken, it counts as a missed appointment in the patient’s Family File. Dentrix tracks the date of the last missed appointment and keeps a running total of how many appointments the patient has missed.

When scheduling appointments for patients, the Missed Appointments number is a good reference for the office to look at because you may not want to give a patient with lots of missed appointments a prime appointment time, like late in the afternoon.

When you break an appointment, the patient’s appointment is moved off the schedule and Dentrix places it on the Unscheduled list. You can use the Unscheduled List as a resource to fill holes in your schedule. If the patient wants to reschedule their appointment at the time they are canceling, I would still recommend breaking the appointment first, so that Dentrix tracks the missed appointment. Then schedule the patient a new appointment.

When you attempt to schedule an appointment for a patient who already has an appointment on the Unscheduled List, Dentrix will alert you that the patient has an unscheduled appointment and ask you if you would like to view the patient’s appointment list.

It’s important to answer “Yes” to this message. Choosing “Yes” opens the Family Appointment List for the patient where you can view any unscheduled appointments.

Choose the <Unscheduled Appt> from the list and click the View Appt button. The appointment information window will appear with the unscheduled procedures. Then you can choose to Pinboard the appointment and reschedule the patient.

The reason it’s so important to answer “Yes” when Dentrix asks if you would like to view the patient’s appointment list, is because when you reschedule the appointment the way I described above, the appointment will be moved off the Unscheduled List. I find that many offices are just creating new appointments instead of rescheduling them through the appointment list and it results in their Unscheduled List being inaccurate. Patients continue to be on the Unscheduled List for appointments that have already been rescheduled. The Unscheduled List is not a functional tool for the office when this happens.

Adding a Patient to Wait/Will Call

If a patient calls and can’t make their appointment two weeks from now, I don’t consider that to be a negative cancellation because the patient is giving the office plenty of notice. If the patient can reschedule, you could simply move their appointment to the Pinboard and find another open time for their appointment. If they are unable to reschedule at this time, use the Wait/Will Call option. Double click on the patient’s appointment, then in the appointment information window, select Wait/Will Call.

his will remove the patient’s appointment from the Appointment Book and move them to the Unscheduled List. This gives you the ability to follow up with the patient to get them rescheduled. When you view the Unscheduled List, it shows whether the appointment was broken or marked as wait will call.

When you are contacting patients to reschedule, I recommend contacting the Wait/Will Call patients first, since they had given you advance notice when they cancelled their appointments. Dentrix does not consider appointments marked as Wait/Will Call to be a missed appointment in the Family File, so use this feature when it’s not a negative cancellation.

Try using these Dentrix features for the different types of cancellation situations you have in your office. I recommend using the Break Appointment option when patients no-show or cancel within 24 hours of their appointment. I recommend using Wait/Will Call option if the patient is unable to reschedule at this time and they have given the office at least 24 hours’ notice.


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By Charlotte Skaggs
Certified Dentrix Trainer and The Dentrix Office Manager columnist

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for over 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.