Want to give your patients the ability to cancel their own appointments? We've got you covered! You can add a cancellation link to both your emails and SMS communications!
To let your patients cancel online, you'll need to include the cancellation link placeholder within your confirmation and/or reminders. This guide will cover the process.
Some quick notes on cancellations and payments:
If a patient has paid in full for their online booking in advance, they cannot cancel their own appointment using the cancellation link.
If they have paid a deposit (not the full amount), they will still be able to cancel online.
If a deposit has been made and then the patient has paid the remainder before the appointment (i.e. over the phone), the cancellation link won't work.
Essentially, if there is a fully paid invoice before the appointment occurs (and the invoice is marked as closed in Cliniko), the online cancellation link won't work. You will need to manually cancel the appointment.
Let patients cancel their own appointments
First, include the "cancellation link" placeholder
Head to Settings and select either Appointment confirmations or Appointment reminders (you'll repeat this process for both types of messages):
Select the applicable confirmation or reminder template from the list.
Then, find the Email or SMS content section, and craft your "cancellation text" somewhere in the text editor, where it would make sense to have it. We suggest something like, If you need to cancel your appointment, you can do so here:.
Once you've typed that out, select the CancellationLink "placeholder" from APPOINTMENT drop-down menu:
This will then "place" that in the content of your template:
Keep in mind that if you're adding the cancellation link to your SMS reminders, it could affect the amount of SMS credits needed:
If needed, adjust the content of your SMS templates to reduce the necessary credits.
Once finished, click Update template and you're all set! Repeat the process for any additional confirmation and reminder templates as needed 🙌 You've now completed step one 🎉.
Then, specify the "minimum notice" (the amount of time before the appointment that a patient is allowed to cancel)
Head to Settings, and then General settings:
Under Minimum notice for cancellations, select your timeframe:
You can specify anywhere from no restriction (meaning they could cancel a minute before their appointment was supposed to start!) to nine days (meaning if they tried to cancel at 8 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds before their appointment, they could not).
Click Save settings, and you're all done!
Now, when your patient cancels their appointment from that confirmation email, they would see a screen like this:
They can select the reason for cancelling, and include any notes!
However, if the "minimum notice for cancellations" time has passed, the patient would see the following instead:
That's it! Meanwhile, you can also set up cancellation notifications for practitioners, so practitioners can be alerted if an appointment is cancelled.