Cancellation rate

Cancellation rate tracks appointments a patient actively cancels or asks to reschedule, as opposed to a no-show where they simply never appear. It sounds less serious than a no-show, since the patient at least gave notice, but a high cancellation rate can be just as expensive if the practice's process makes it too easy to bail with a text and too hard to actually fill the resulting hole.

The pattern worth watching is how a practice responds to a cancellation request. A front desk trained only to say "no problem, when works better for you" is training patients that canceling is effortless and consequence-free; a front desk trained to ask a genuine question first (what changed, is there anything we can do to make today work) keeps a meaningful share of cancellations from happening at all, without ever sounding pushy about it.

Separate short-notice cancellations from ones made days in advance when you track this number, since same-day and next-day cancellations are the ones that actually cost production; a cancellation made two weeks out that gets rebooked immediately is a non-event. The rate matters less as a raw percentage than as a signal of whether open time is being created faster than the schedule can absorb it.