Forward Bookings
Forward Bookings is an incredibly important metric for any allied health business. It measures how many appointments have been booked in advance of the next appointment.
Technical Definition
Every attendance (any patient booked for a class or consultation) has a forward booking number.
This number is recalculated each time appointments are updated from your PMS (usually once a day, or more frequently if your system syncs more often).
How Forward Bookings Are Calculated
Identify the patient’s next appointment in the same profession (it can be at any location).
If the next appointment is more than 90 days after their most recent appointment, the patient has zero forward bookings.
Otherwise, count all valid future appointments that meet the following conditions:
The appointment date/time is after the current appointment.
The appointment was not cancelled before its scheduled date/time.
The booking was made before the identified “next appointment”.
The appointment is within the same profession as the current one (but again, can be at any location).
This current formula gives us the best insight into 'real' forward booking performance of practitioners. If you have suggestions or feedback on this please get in touch and let us know!
A practical example
| Attendance # | Comments |
| 1 (1 forward booking) | The next appointment was booked in after this appointment finished, but it's within 90 days of this appointment and the booking date is obviously before the appt date of the next appointment. It was cancelled after this appointment happened so still counts as a forward booking. Appointment 3 was booked after Appointment 2 date so doesn't count as a forward booking |
| 2 (no forward bookings) | The next appointment is 2 years later so definitely not considered a forward booking |
| 3 (3 forward bookings) | Upon completion of this May 21 appointment, 3 bookings were made. All of the booking dates are before the next appt date of May 28th. |
| 4 (2 forward bookings) | No additional bookings made so forward bookings number is reducing |
| 5 (1 forward booking) | No additional bookings made so forward bookings number is reducing |
| 6 (1 forward booking) | Next appointment was booked in before next appointment occured. It was later cancelled but the cancellation happened after date of this appointment. |
| 7 (1 forward booking) | One final appt booked in after this |
| 8 (no forward bookings) | Last appointment for this client ever, so no future bookings |
How forward bookings are aggregated
As seen above, each attendance has it's own number of foward bookings.
When you are reporting on this at a higher level, such as `Forward Bookings` metric on the Mega Report in weekly/monthly view, we calculate the final figure as follows:
Work out the average (mean) forward bookings per client in this period.
EG: if they had one appt then it's that number, if they had two appointments (one with 4 forward bookings, one with 3) then the forward bookings for that client is 3.5.Now find the median (middle value) of the above per-client values
So if your whole week was as follows:
- Isaac had two appointments, one with 10 forward bookings, one with 9 forward bookings
- Monique had one appointment with 3 forward bookings
- Toby had one appointment with 1 forward booking
So the final numbers per client are: 9.5 (isaac), 3, 1
Arranging them in order is 1,3,9.5 and the middle value is 3.
So the 'Forward Bookings' metric for this week will be 3