Life’s unpredictable. For that very reason, Jane lets you customize your cancellation policy while still giving patients lots of options.
Late Cancellation Period
You can set a period of time prior to an appointment where a patient can cancel without penalty.
All communication to a patient about their appointments (reminders & notifications) will include a message that lets them know about the late cancellation period.
Customizing the Default Language of the Cancellation Policy
If you’d like to customize the default language of your clinic’s cancellation policy, head to your Settings and select Language from the left-hand menu.
Within the Language section of your account, you can choose to edit your Online Booking: Agree To Cancellation Policy, Online Booking: Cancellation Policy, and Email: Cancellation Policy to update those areas of Jane as needed.
Check out our Customizing Language in Jane for more ways you can customize your Jane account.
Allowing Patients to Cancel
Patients will be able to cancel upcoming appointments by visiting their “My Account” page (if you’ve enabled this feature). They can only cancel an appointment if it is prior to the “Late Cancellation Period”. Otherwise, a “Contact to Cancel” message will appear.
Preventing Patients From Cancelling or Rescheduling Appointments
If you are looking to limit the amount of cancellations and rescheduling from the patient’s side you can do this by disabling Allow Cancellations.
Head to the Settings tab and select Online Booking. Under the Booking, Cancelling & Relationships section, you can then un-check Allow Cancellations and Save to update.
If a patient tries to cancel an upcoming appointment or reschedule from their patient portal, they will now be prompted to contact you directly.
Note📍: When an appointment is booked administratively or online, there is a 3-minute buffer window where the client can cancel on their My Account page. The 3-minute cancellation window is applicable, regardless of whether your clinic has online booking and cancellations disabled. For more information on how this works, you can check out our Online Booking Grace Period guide.
Patient’s My Account Page - Cancellable Appointment
Patient’s My Account Page - Contact to Cancel
Last Minute Cancellations and Rescheduling
Sometimes those last-minute cancellations and rescheduling can really affect our ability to get other patients booked in. In this case, the clinic can also increase the Late Cancellation Period.
The default in Jane is to allow for Cancellations by 24 hours, this way patients can go to their My Account/Online Portal to reschedule and cancel upcoming appointments.
By increasing the Late Cancellation Period above 24 hours, which can range anywhere from 36 hours to 7 days - the clinic will be able to have more restrictions around patient’s ability to change their upcoming appointments.
This is also found by heading to the Settings tab and selecting Online Booking, then looking under the Booking, Cancelling & Relationshipssection. There will be a dropdown for you to change this to a time range that fits best with your cancellation policy:
Collecting Consents For Your Cancellation Policy
Setting the cancellation policy as we’ve seen above can be really helpful to ensure that patients are booking, cancelling, and rescheduling their appointments within a timeframe that works for you and your clinic. To ensure that clinic and patient are aligned on this, it can be helpful to include your cancellation policy as a consent in your Intake Form which patients acknowledge.
You can set up your Consents in Intake Forms under the Forms & Surveys part of Settings. When you Edit or set up your Intake Form, you can navigate to Consents to add your cancellation policy as a consent that a patient would need to agree to.
💡Pro Tip: If you’re collecting credit card information through the intake form using Jane Payments (more info here), your cancellation policy will also be displayed when the patient adds their card.
For a deeper dive into setting up your forms, this is covered in more detail in our guide on Intake Forms.
We hope this helps you set up a cancellation flow that works best for your clinic!