When should I advise my team to cancel vs. move a session within our EHR?
- A clinician should mark a session as “canceled” when:
- A client asks to cancel a session and does so in advance of your cancelation deadline
- A client asks to reschedule a session, but they aren’t able to reschedule in the same week as the original session
- The Clinician asks to reschedule: due to emergency, illness, a conflict, etc. EVEN IF they are able to get the client in to reschedule on the same week as the original appt, still mark as a cancelation. We want to track how often clinicians are canceling on clients, as a high rate interferes with continuity of care and can make clients feel devalued– which interferes with the therapeutic relationship.
- A clinician should simply move the appointment when:
- A client asks to reschedule a session and they ARE able to reschedule in the same week as the original appt, the clinician should move the appointment to a different day/time. This would not count towards the cancellation rate because there is no lost revenue.
How should I instruct my team to log their vacation time in our EHR?
Whether or not to factor vacation time or PTO into the cancelation rate is a matter of your practice’s preference. If you want to capture ALL lost revenue possibilities, you might have clinicians cancel sessions when they are on vacation. If the time off is approved as PTO, you may not want to consider that as part of your cancelation rate. In that case, consider having your clinicians delete appointments from the calendar.How will deleted appointments in our EHR appear within PracticeVital?
We remove any appointments in PracticeVital that get deleted in your EHR. It may take up to two days for a deleted appointment to be reflected in PracticeVital.How should we code couples sessions?
You should stick with your current process, but be aware of some nuances for SimplePractice and TherapyNotes:
- If you use the SimplePractice couples client type and one member of the couple sees a clinician individually, PracticeVital will treat them as a separate client. If you want that client to be included in retention and churn calculations they will need to have an intake session occur.
- In TherapyNotes you probably have a separate client created for each member of the couple, but you only have one identified on each appointment. The numbers will stay consistent on PracticeVital as long as you continue to schedule couples appointments with that same person going forward.
TherapyNotes & TheraNest Users: How can we count clinician cancels separate from client cancels?
If you would like to count clinician cancelations separate from client cancelations (recommended), you’ll need to create a custom CPT code such as “CLINCNL” so we can map that data separately.