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OutSmart Guide

Cancellation Policy

Patients can cancel appointments online from the Patient Portal once you’ve turned the option on. Cancellation is configured in two places:

  • A global cancellation policy on your online booking page sets the default behavior for every event type.
  • Individual event types can override the global policy with their own cancellation rules.

Setting the Global Cancellation Policy

The global cancellation policy lives in the Review and Confirm panel of your online booking page’s Booking Flow settings:

  1. Open your online booking page in edit mode (see Edit Mode Basics).
  2. Click the Settings menu in the edit toolbar.
  3. Find the Booking Flow Panels section and open Review and Confirm.
  4. Click Edit Review Settings.
  5. Set the Cancellation Policy options:
  • Whether patients can cancel online at all
  • The minimum notice required for cancellation (e.g., 24 hours)

What “Allow Online Cancellation” Means

When online cancellation is on, patients see a Cancel button next to their appointments in the Patient Portal. Clicking it cancels the appointment immediately and updates the calendar.

If online cancellation is off, patients have no cancel button — they need to contact your clinic by phone or email instead.

Minimum Notice for Cancellation

If you allow online cancellation, you can also set a minimum notice — how far in advance a patient must cancel. For example, with a 24-hour minimum notice, a patient with a 9 am appointment tomorrow can cancel until 9 am today; after that, the cancel button is hidden and they’re prompted to contact the clinic.

This protects you from last-minute cancellations that don’t give you time to fill the slot.

Overriding the Policy per Event Type

Individual event types can override the global policy. This is useful when different types of appointments have different cancellation needs — for example, a high-demand initial consultation might require 48 hours notice while a routine follow-up only needs 2 hours.

To set a per-event-type override:

  1. Open the Event Manager (gear icon at the top right of the calendar → Event Manager).
  2. Edit the event type you want to override.
  3. In the event type editor, find the cancellation settings.
  4. Set the per-event-type cancellation policy and minimum notice.

The per-event-type values, when set, take precedence over the global policy. If an event type doesn’t have its own cancellation settings, the global policy applies.

See Creating Event Types for the full event type editor.

Which Appointments Patients Can Cancel

Even when online cancellation is on, patients can only see and cancel appointments they have proof of access to:

  • Appointments they booked themselves online through your booking page — visible by default, can be cancelled
  • Appointments they did not book themselves — only visible after their Patient Portal account has been authorized with a Medical Records Access Code. Until that happens, they only see appointments they booked themselves

This is a privacy protection. A patient who just signed up to book an appointment can see and cancel that booking, but they can’t see anything else about their clinic record until you’ve explicitly granted access.

Who Can Change the Cancellation Policy

You need edit access to the online booking page to change the global cancellation policy. That includes:

  • The office owner
  • Admin staff at the office
  • A practitioner on their own practitioner-priority booking page (their personal page only)

Per-event-type overrides are set in the Event Manager and follow the same edit permissions as other event type settings.