Cancellation rates are an important statistic to measure and monitor in private practice.
It is the number of client sessions cancelled as a percentage of the total number of booked sessions over a specific period.
Or, in a simpler way, cancellation rate is the percentage of the total booked sessions that were cancelled in a given period.
How do you calculate it?
Calculating the cancellation rate in private practice is simple, as long as you know the following information:
- The total number of booked client sessions (i.e., NOT the number of available hours) in a given period
- The number of sessions cancelled within the same period
Number of Sessions Cancelled / Total Number of Booked Sessions x 100
And as the percentage represents a negative figure (i.e. cancelled sessions), the lower the percentage, the better.
Can you just subtract the attendance rate from 100?
Client attendance rate represents the percentage of the total booked sessions that were attended in a given period. So it might seem to make sense to just subtract this figure from 100, following the below formula:
% of Attended Sessions + % of Non-Attended Sessions = Total Sessions (100%)
However, your cancelled appointments make up only a part of the non-attended sessions, as the non-attended sessions include rescheduled and no-showed sessions as well.
So, in order to maximise accuracy, calculate the cancellation rate independently.