"Criminal Activity": Appointment changes that affect your metrics
'Criminal Activity' is the name given to certain appointment changes detected by The BOS. It is a tongue-in-cheek name made by the development team that caught on.
The activity it detects is certainly not criminal and probably not even 'bad', but is absolutely useful to help you understand changes in your metrics over time.
What problem does this solve?
Many of our tenants noticed that Booked Hours which includes cancellations would reduce for the current week and the following week as the week progressed. This shouldn't be happening as the appointment happening or not happening (due to cancellation or DNA) shouldn't affect this number.
The cause was identified as the practitioners moving appointments to future dates either because
- It reduces their cancellation stats
- It's easier than cancelling an appointment and booking in a new one.
The problem is this makes it hard to forecast hours/revenue/cancellations/utilisation rates as the booked hours shift forwards with cancellations being under-reported and practitioners retrospectively looking less busy as the appointment that should have been cancelled is now white space.
What is considered 'criminal activity'?
Criminal activity is any appointment that has either:
- Moved to a different week
- Moved to a different month
- 'vanished' from the calendar
The first two are easy to understand. Moving a booking from May 30th to June 2nd will reduce the booked hours for May while increasing the hours for June, potentially changing monthly forecasts. The same applies on a weekly basis, which will primarily benefit practice managers who often report metrics on a weekly basis.
The final type is 'vanished from the calendar'. The BOS refreshes data from your PMS for the last month and next two months, so if an appointment was moved from 'next month' to '12 months from now' then it will no longer get picked up by The BOS until closer to the date. This will appear as criminal activity marked as 'no longer in calendar'.
How is criminal activity reported on
Currently 'criminal activity' is detected whenever appointment data is collected from your PMS. This generally happens:
- Early each morning when data is automatically updated
- Whenever somebody triggers a manual data refresh by pressing 'refresh data' on Mega Report
During the data refresh if any 'criminal activity' data is detected then the specified contact will be sent a single email outlining all the 'criminal activity' detected during that appointment refresh.
Often the practice manager who receives the emails will make a rule to put them in a separate folder so they are there for future reference in the event you notice a change in the numbers and want to investigate.
Future Development
Our product roadmap includes collecting this data so that it can be reported on, such as a 'Criminal Activity' row on the mega report. This would allow you to do breakdowns by practitioner, location and more.
Our clients are currently more interested in development of other features so if you are interested in enhanced 'criminal activity' reporting please get in touch with us so we can prioritise development.