How to cancel or reschedule a visit, what happens if you miss one, what happens when we cancel or the technology fails, and how clinical services are billed. A disagreement about a fee never affects your care or your records.
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1What this document covers
This is about appointments and clinical services: canceling one, rescheduling one, missing one, what happens when we have to cancel, and how these services are billed.
It does not cover anything we ship you in a box. Products, returns and refunds on merchandise are in the Returns and Refunds Policy, and nothing in that document applies to your care.
2Canceling or rescheduling a visit
Please tell us at least 24 hours before your visit if you cannot make it.
That is the time we need to offer your slot to somebody else who is waiting.
You can reschedule as easily as you can cancel, and rescheduling is usually the better option. If the time no longer works, move it rather than canceling and starting over.
Less than 24 hours' notice is a late cancellation. Tell us anyway. Late notice is always better than no notice, and a late cancellation is treated more favorably than a missed visit for exactly that reason.
2.1 How to cancel or reschedule
In your account. Open the appointment in your patient portal and cancel or reschedule it there. This is the fastest way and it works without talking to anybody.
By email. Write to support@sleepbalanceacademy.com with your name and the date and time of the visit. Use this if you are inside the window where the portal will no longer let you do it yourself.
By replying to a reminder. Reply to your appointment reminder. A reply telling us you cannot make it counts as telling us.
Whichever way you do it, we confirm it. If you do not get a confirmation, assume it did not go through and tell us again. We would rather hear twice than not at all.
3If you are running late
Join anyway. Your waiting room opens 15 minutes before the start time, and you can still join up to 20 minutes after it.
If you arrive late, your clinician sees you if there is enough time left to do it properly. If there is not, you reschedule, and arriving late is not treated as a missed visit.
If you know you are going to be late, send a message from the portal or write to us. Your clinician can often make room for it.
4A missed visit
A missed visit
You did not join a scheduled visit, and you did not tell us beforehand that you could not make it. If you told us, however late, it is a cancellation and not a missed visit.
Your clinician waits at least 10 minutes past the start time before recording a missed visit, and they are looking out for you the whole time. If you join inside the window in section 3, nothing is recorded.
4.1 What happens after one
Nothing happens to you. We reach out, ask whether everything is all right, and offer to rebook. There is no fee, no mark against you, and no change to your care. People miss appointments, and the first question is whether you are okay rather than what you owe.
4.2 What happens after a second
We reach out again, and this time we ask a different question: whether the appointment time, the format, or something else about how we have set this up is not working for you. Two missed visits usually means we have booked you badly rather than that you have done something wrong.
We may ask you to confirm your next appointment a day or two beforehand. That is so we can release the slot if you cannot make it, and confirming takes one tap.
There is still no fee at this point.
4.3 What happens after several
If visits are repeatedly missed, we talk to you directly before we change anything. What we may do after that conversation:
Confirmation before each visit. Ask you to confirm each appointment in advance, so a slot you cannot use goes to somebody who can.
A different booking pattern. Offer you appointments that are available sooner rather than holding a reserved slot further out.
A fee. Apply a fee for a missed visit. If a fee could ever apply to you, we tell you the amount and the circumstances in writing before the appointment it could apply to, never afterwards. We do not apply one to a first missed visit, we do not apply one where the law where you are does not allow it, and we waive it if you ask and tell us what happened.
We do not end your care because of missed appointments without talking to you first, and we never withhold your medical record over one.
5Emergencies and other good reasons
If something happened, tell us and we take you at your word. We do not ask you to prove it.
A missed or late-canceled visit is not held against you, and no fee applies, where something outside your control got in the way. That includes, and is not limited to:
A medical emergency, whether yours or somebody else's.
Being in hospital, or taking someone else there.
A death or a serious illness in your family.
Caring for a child or an adult when the arrangement fell through and it could not wait.
A car that would not start, a bus that never came, or a journey that went wrong.
Losing power, losing internet, or a phone that failed.
Something at work you genuinely could not leave.
A day when your health, including your mental health, made getting on a call more than you could do.
Anything else that a reasonable person would call a good reason.
You do not need to give us details, and you do not need to justify yourself. Telling us that something came up and you could not make it is enough. We will not ask for a doctor's note, a death certificate, a repair bill, or any other document.
If you are treated for something that makes appointments hard to keep, tell us once and we will build that into how we schedule you, so you are not explaining it every time.
6If we cancel your visit
Sometimes we have to cancel. A clinician gets sick, an emergency pulls them away from the schedule, or something on our side goes wrong.
When that happens, this is what you are owed:
We tell you quickly. We tell you as soon as we know, by the fastest way we can reach you, and we tell you why as far as we properly can.
No charge. You are not charged. If you were already charged, we refund you in full without waiting for you to ask.
Priority rebooking. You go to the front of the queue for rebooking. We offer you the earliest times we have, ahead of new bookings, and we work around your schedule rather than ours.
We cover what it cost you. If our cancellation cost you something real, such as time you had booked off or equipment you had to keep longer, tell us and we will put it right.
If we cannot get you a new appointment reasonably soon and the delay matters for your care, we do not simply leave you in the queue. We look for another clinician who can see you sooner, and we tell you where things stand rather than going quiet.
If we canceled on you and you would rather not continue, tell us. We refund you in full for anything you have paid for and not received.
7If the technology fails
If the visit could not happen because the connection failed, you are not charged and we rebook you. That is the whole rule.
A dropped connection is not the end of the visit. There is a short grace period for getting back in, and if you rejoin within it the visit carries on where it left off. If video will not work at all, your clinician may be able to continue by audio, where that is right for what you are being seen for, and you decide whether you are comfortable with that.
If the visit cannot go ahead, we rebook it with priority and you pay nothing extra. It is not recorded as a missed visit.
We do not investigate whose internet was at fault. Neither of us can prove it, and a rule that cannot be settled is a rule the company would always win. If the visit did not happen, you are not charged for it.
If a visit started and had to stop partway through for a technical reason, and it could not be finished, we either complete it at no additional cost or refund you, and you choose which.
8How clinical services are billed
We tell you the price of a clinical service before you book it. There is no separate booking fee, and no charge appears that we did not name beforehand.
We state when the charge is taken at the point you enter your payment details. Where a clinician has to review something before the service can be delivered, we tell you plainly whether you are being charged now or later, rather than taking the money and leaving you to find out.
What you pay is what we told you at the time you booked. If anything about that changes before your visit, we tell you first and you decide whether to go ahead.
9What your fee covers
You are paying for a clinician's time and judgment. You are not paying for a particular answer.
A visit fee covers all of this, not only the minutes you are on the call:
Your clinician reading your record and preparing before the visit.
The visit itself.
Writing it up, and the orders, referrals or prescriptions that follow from it where they are appropriate.
Messages that follow directly from the visit, within a reasonable period afterwards, which we do not bill separately.
A clinician who reviews everything and concludes that a treatment, a device or a prescription is not right for you has done the work you paid for, and done it properly. That is a real clinical answer and it is often the more careful one. It is not a failed transaction and it is not refundable on that basis.
What a fee never buys is a particular diagnosis, a particular prescription, or a particular product. If anything we have written anywhere gave you that impression, tell us, because we need to fix it.
10Refunds when a visit did not happen
If the visit did not take place and it was not a visit you missed, you are not charged. If you had already been charged, we refund you in full.
That covers all of these:
You canceled with at least 24 hours' notice.
We canceled, whatever the reason and whatever the notice.
The technology failed and the visit could not go ahead.
The visit was canceled for a good reason under section 5.
Refunds go back the way you paid. We issue the refund as soon as we know the visit is not happening. How long it then takes to appear is up to your bank, which is usually a few business days.
If a visit was part of a program or a package you paid for in advance, and the program is not going to be delivered, we refund the part you have not received. We do not keep money for care that did not happen.
11If you think a charge is wrong
Write to support@sleepbalanceacademy.com and tell us. Say which charge and why you think it is wrong. Somebody will look at it properly and tell you what they found, including when the answer is that the charge was correct.
If you cannot afford something, say that instead. We would far rather talk to you about it than have you avoid care or disappear. Tell us early and there is usually something we can do.
12A fee dispute never affects your care or your records
Nothing about money changes whether you can be seen, whether your treatment continues, or whether you can get your own medical record.
Specifically, while a fee is unpaid or in dispute, we will not:
refuse to see you, or cancel a visit you have already booked
stop or delay a prescription, an order, or a referral you clinically need
withhold your medical record, or any copy of it you ask us for
delay sending your record to another clinician who is treating you
treat you differently in the care you receive
Your right to a copy of your health information does not depend on your account balance, and we will not condition it on payment of a treatment bill. Your rights over your health information are set out in the Notice of Privacy Practices, and nothing in this document limits them.
Nothing here stops you from raising a concern with your state's medical or licensing board, with your state attorney general, with the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, or with your card issuer. We will not treat your doing so as a reason to change your care.
13Changes to this document
We update this document when what we do changes, when the law changes, or when we find wording that is unclear. Every version is kept, and each one records the date it took effect.
How you find out depends on how much changed. A correction that does not change your rights is simply published. A change that does affect your rights is announced before it takes effect. A change that materially alters what you agreed to is not applied to you by silence: we ask you to accept it, and continuing to browse the site is not treated as acceptance.
If you want a copy of an earlier version, or want to know what changed and when, write to support@sleepbalanceacademy.com and we will send it to you.
Write to us to cancel, to reschedule, to tell us what happened when you missed a visit, or to question a charge. If you are canceling, please tell us the date and time of the visit so we can find it quickly.
