Cancellation Fill

Who this page is for: practice managers deciding how to reduce unused appointment capacity without turning a booking tool into a clinical decision tool.

The hard part of a last-minute cancellation is often not demand. Reception may already have people to call, but staff are also checking patients in, taking payments and answering phones. Cancellation Fill turns that interruption-heavy job into one controlled offer at a time.

It is a separate availability workflow. The Refera Inbox remains strictly ordered by referral arrival and is never re-sorted.

Real-patient use is default-off until fresh privacy, legal and practice-operational sign-off for this separate workflow is recorded.

Two lanes, never one merged queue

Ready to book

This lane is for an unbooked referral after named staff record that the practice decided it was ready for scheduling outside Refera. The record must carry:

• the decision time and staff identity;
• an administrative contact basis; and
• the practice instruction to contact for an initial booking.

The lane stays in original referral arrival order, with record ID as the deterministic tie-breaker. Refera never infers readiness and never enrols the unprocessed referral pile.

Earlier appointment

This lane is for a patient who is already booked or already in the practice’s scheduling process and has specifically opted into earlier-appointment offers. The record must carry:

• current, specific opt-in evidence and its method;
• the stated available-from and available-until times;
• the contact basis and destination.

This lane is ordered by stated available-from time, then referral arrival, then record ID. A withdrawal removes the record immediately and ends any active offer.

One opening, one active offer

The workflow is deliberately serial:

1. Staff record the cancelled appointment and an optional estimated session value.
2. They choose one of the two lanes. The candidates remain separate.
3. Refera prepares generic appointment copy for the first suitable record.
4. Staff approve and copy the draft. It is still not sent.
5. Staff use the practice’s normal SMS, email or calling system.
6. Staff attest Mark offered. Only then does the response timer start.
7. A response can be accepted, declined, skipped or expired.
8. Acceptance is not a booking. Staff book in the practice system and separately choose Mark filled.

Only rank one can prepare a draft. Later records remain visible for evidence review, but the service refuses a later draft until staff complete or explicitly skip the record ahead of it.

Refera never auto-sends, independently contacts a patient or reserves an appointment.

Operational value, bounded honestly

Cancellation Fill reports openings created, openings marked filled, fill rate, median and average time-to-fill, and estimated session value protected. The value is the sum of the practice-entered estimate on slots that staff marked filled. Drafts, offers and acceptances do not count.

This is an operational estimate, not recovered revenue, realised income or an ROI guarantee. A practice can compare the estimate with its actual Refera invoice, but Refera does not claim the comparison proves a return.

What never affects order

Diagnosis, reason for referral, quoted urgency, acuity, severity and clinical priority are not fields in the ordering rule. Cancellation Fill v1 has no compatibility or preference matching layer. It does not score or rank people.

Related

• Run Cancellation Fill - the front-desk steps.
• Cancellation Fill safety and consent - privacy, consent and message boundaries.
• Verbatim urgency - why the Inbox never re-sorts.