Patient Dismissal, Late Cancel and No Show Policies

Patient Dismissal Policy

Columbus Regional Health strives to be your health partner as you obtain your healthcare.  We recognize the importance of a strong relationship between you and your healthcare team.  There may be situations when your healthcare team can recommend a request for patient termination from a provider, department, or Columbus Regional Health.  Patient terminations do not include Emergency Department Services.  Terminations from one provider(s) or department(s) does not automatically terminate you from other providers/departments in CRH. 

The reason(s) for terminating the patient/care provider relationship include:

• Missing three appointments in the previous rolling 12 months with repeated attempts to reschedule
• Loss of physician/patient mutual rapport that results in negative care outcomes.
• Inappropriate behavior which includes, but is not limited to, workplace violence, threatening behaviors, discriminatory, and/or sexual behaviors.  If the behavior is so egregious or dangerous, immediate termination may occur. 

Patients are not considered for termination for any of the following reasons such as; financial reasons, such as the inability to pay for services rendered; race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex, citizenship status, pregnancy, disability, military status, religion; or patient’s age that may require a transfer of care to an appropriate provider. 

If a termination does occur, notification will be provided to the patient in writing that includes the reason for termination, effective date, referral suggestion, and patient responsibilities.  

Late Cancel & No Show Policy

Purpose: To define the policy for late cancellations and no shows of patient appointments across all Columbus Regional Health.

Definitions:

• Columbus Regional Health: Consists of Columbus Regional Hospital and Columbus Regional Health Physicians.
• Late Cancel: An appointment cancelled within 24 hours of the appointment start time.
• No-Show: An appointment missed without notifying the department in advance or patients who arrive more than 10 minutes late for check-in and cannot be seen that day will be considered a no-show.
• Established Patient: An established patient is one who has received professional services from a physician/qualified health care professional or another physician/other qualified health care professional of the exact same specialty and subspecialty who belongs to the same group practice, within the past three years.
• Chronic No-Show Established Patient: A patient will be considered a chronic no-show if the patient has logged three or more no-shows in a rolling 12-month period beginning with the first no-show event. The no-shows do not need to be consecutive. 
• New Patient: A new patient is one who has not received any professional services from a physician/qualified health care professional or another physician/qualified health care professional of the exact same specialty and subspecialty who belongs to the same group practice, within the past three years.
• Chronic No-Show New Patient: A patient will be considered a chronic no-show new patient if the patient has logged two or more no-shows with that practice notwithstanding timeframe.

Policy:

• No Show
  • Any appointment that qualifies as a no-show by the above definition will be marked either manually or by the system as no-show in the Final Appointment Status of the scheduling system.
  • No-shows for established patients will be tracked at the department level over a rolling 12 month period, beginning with the first no-show event.
  • No-Shows for new patients will be tracked at the department level.
  • Chronic no-show patients may be subject to dismissal by the individual department affected.
    • Please refer to the CRH Dismissal Policy for appropriateness and procedures.
  • It is at the discretion of the department to accept or not accept patients that have been dismissed by other departments as new patients.
    • Please refer to the CRH Dismissal Policy for appropriateness and procedures.
• Late Cancel
  • Any appointment cancelled within 24 hours of the appointment start time will be considered a Late Cancellation and marked as "Cancelled" in the Final Appointment Status of the scheduling system.
  • Office staff will manually mark an appointment as Cancelled and add a Cancellation Reason based on definition in linked Standard Work Instruction.
  • Patients cancelling their appointments via MyChart will follow the definitions for Late Cancel and No Show outlined in this policy.