Allie 'Locks' the Reporting Period of No Future Appointments for Accuracy
There is no "locked" reporting period in Cliniko. However, in Allie we "lock" the reporting period so that you have an accurate representation of what actually happened at that time that will affect the No Future Appointments metric.
No Future Appointments Definition
Cliniko's Definition: the number of patients who had appointments during the report's time period, but who do not have anything booked in the future.
Allie's Definition: Number of unique patients who made it to any individual appointment in the report period, but didn’t make any new appointment (individual/group) beyond the report period by the end of the report period.
Cliniko's definition excluded the "by the end of the report period" bit. The difference is that Allie 'locks' the reporting period data to capture what happened, where as Cliniko dynamically and retrospectively updates data ie doesn't lock the reporting period and therefore is 'changing history'.
Here's an example to illustrate those differences in practice:
Client Johnno makes an appointment on Sep 19, 2023. He arrives to the appointment, and doesn't make a future appointment.
Suppose today's date is Sep 23, 2023 - Saturday. I log in to Allie. My current reporting period is set to review the last 2 weeks: Aug 28, 2023 to Sep 23, 2023. Because Johnno has not made any future appointment, this week will report 1 No Future Appointment. Cliniko would be reporting the same thing, 1 Without Upcoming Appointments.
Johnno then calls the clinic on Sep 26, 2023, and makes an appointment for Oct 16, 2023.
Suppose that today is now Sep 30, 2023 - also Saturday. I log in to Allie. I look at the same reporting period as my previous login: Aug 28, 2023 to Sep 23, 2023. Allie will still report 1 No Future Appointment, whereas Cliniko will report 0 Without Upcoming. Allie "locks" the data based on the reporting period you're looking at, regardless of when you look at it. Because Johnno made the appointment outside of the reporting period, that appointment isn't counted as a future appointment for that reporting period. Whereas Cliniko doesn't care, it looks at the appointments in a selected time window, but still counts appointments made outside that window all the way to the future.
In the real world, this translates to Allie showing higher No Future Appointment numbers on a past reporting period, and by extension a lower Rebooking Rate. Cliniko would account for future appointments even outside the reporting period, and would log lower No Future Appointment and higher Rebooking Rate.
Allie's NFA/WU definition is objectively better because it locks that number based on the reporting period (ie: when you look at the data). This means we have historical precision of the data. Whereas Cliniko does not. It does not have historical precision because the numbers constantly change depending on when you look.
Timing Differences mean Metric Differences
Allie's number will always have some variance compared to Cliniko regardless of whether we keep this definition or not, because again Cliniko does not have historical precision. The numbers in Allie will be based on when they were imported from Cliniko