Late-arrival and no-show policies

We’re glad you’ve chosen The University of Kansas Health System. We look forward to providing your care and building a collaborative relationship with you.

We know unexpected circumstances pop up in everyone’s life. Sometimes they make us unavoidably late to appointments or unable to get to them at all. We understand. We will always do the best we can to be flexible and deliver the planned care you need in our physician and provider offices.

However, there may be times when the care team must reschedule a visit for a patient who arrives late for their appointment. Occasionally, when late arrival is repeated or when a patient does not show up at all for their appointment, that patient will not be able to see another provider in the same office. Because we don’t want to have to take these steps, we’d like to outline our policies for your awareness before your appointment begins. Working together and ensuring consistency will help us avoid these measures.

Again, we know life sometimes throws the unexpected at us. If you’re going to be late or won’t make your appointment at all at the last minute, give us a call and let us know. We’ll do our best to be flexible. But please be aware of these policies we practice when we must to ensure all our patients – yourself included – get quality time with their provider as scheduled.

• Late patient policy
  A patient is considered late when they arrive with 50% or less of their scheduled appointment time remaining. When this happens, our team will check the calendars of other patients and providers. We’ll check you in for your visit if we can do so without disrupting the needs of other patients. If your visit will disrupt other patients’ needs, we’ll try to offer you an appointment later in the day with the same provider or with a different provider at that time or later in the day. We can also consult with the original provider to see if they can see you at the end of the day. If none of these options work for our providers, for our staff and for you, we will reschedule with the original provider at their next-available date.
• No-show patient policy
  When a patient does not notify their provider’s office of a need to cancel or reschedule and does not arrive for an appointment, we call this a no-show. Frequent no-shows can cause challenges for provider offices when important time for patients goes unused. We’ll remind you of your upcoming appointment by text or phone several days in advance and give you the opportunity to let us know of any need to cancel or reschedule. If a patient is a no-show, we’ll alert them to ensure awareness. A patient who does not show up 3 times within 12 months may be suspended from our practice for at least 6 months – though that’s not ever something we want.
  
  If you know you must miss an appointment, please contact us by noon the day before if you can. If something happens closer to your appointment time, call to let us know. If inclement weather, hospitalization or another understandable reason prevents you from arriving, we won’t consider your missed visit a no-show.
  
  Following a first or second no-show, we’ll provide you with a message in MyChart or letter by mail. After a third no-show, a team of health system providers and administrators will consider your situation and medical needs and may determine to suspend you from that physician office for at least 6 months.
  
  
Note: Care teams at The University of Kansas Cancer Center are equally committed to managing staff time well to effectively serve all patients. Our teams will be as flexible as possible to accommodate the scheduling needs of patients receiving complex treatment but may reach out to patients personally if late-arrival or no-shows are recurrent concerns