What this card shows
This card shows how long new patients wait between the early milestones of their fertility journey, month by month. Waiting time is how capacity shows up from the patient's side: when demand outpaces the appointment slots your clinic can offer, the queue lengthens and new patients take longer to be seen. A lead time that climbs month after month is usually the first visible sign that capacity is under pressure, which is why this card sits under capacity utilization. There are two lines, and each one is a number of days:
Enquiry to first consultation: the days from a patient being added to the system, which stands in for their enquiry, to their first booked appointment. Each point sits in the month of that consultation.
First consultation to first clinical appointment: the days from that first appointment to the start of the patient's first treatment cycle. Each point sits in the month the cycle started.
Both lines are medians, not averages. The median is the midpoint: half of the patients in that month waited less than the figure shown and half waited more. It is used here instead of an average so that one unusual case, a patient who waited nine months because they paused treatment, does not pull the whole month up.
The Capacity utilization (booked hours) card on the same tab looks at capacity from the clinic's side: how much of your bookable time is actually booked. The two are worth reading together. Booked hours tells you how full the schedule already is, and this card tells you what that is costing the patients waiting to get into it.
Reading the card
What to look at in your own data:
The level. How many days is a new patient currently waiting to be seen, and how many more days before treatment starts? These are the two numbers to compare against whatever your clinic considers acceptable.
The direction of travel. A line rising over several months means patients are waiting longer than they used to, which usually points at demand outgrowing available slots. A falling line means the opposite.
The gap between the two lines. The two waits have different causes. A long wait to the first consultation is usually about consultation capacity and booking lead time. A long wait from consultation to the start of treatment is usually about workup, tests, funding and consent, so the two move for different reasons and are worth watching separately.
A few things to keep in mind:
Each line is dated by the later of the two events, so the data only resolves in retrospect. A patient appears on the first line only once their consultation has happened, and on the second line only once their first cycle has started. A recent month therefore contains only the patients who have already reached that milestone, and it will fill in as more of them do.
Milestones dated in the future are left out, so the chart never runs past today. A booked but not yet attended appointment, or a cycle scheduled to start next month, does not count yet.
The enquiry date is a stand-in. It is taken from when the patient record was created, which is the closest thing wawa records to the moment the patient first got in touch.
Hover any point to see the exact figure.
A month with only a handful of patients reaching a milestone will move around a lot. Treat short lines and sparse months with caution.
The example image above comes from a test system, where patients were generated with fixed intervals between their milestones. That is why its lines sit almost perfectly flat. Real clinic data moves month to month, so do not use the shape of that example as a reference for what healthy looks like.
The card lives on the Medical director dashboard, on the Group efficiency tab, and responds to the filters at the top:
Date: change the time window. On this card the filter works on the patient's enquiry date, which is different from most of the cards around it, so it decides which patients are in the analysis rather than which months are drawn. It defaults to the past 6 months plus the current month.
Clinic: focus on one or more locations, if your organization has several. Patients are attributed to the location of their first treatment cycle.
Where this data comes from
Three everyday screens in wawa feed this card, one for each of the three milestones.
The clock starts when the patient record is created, on the Add patient form reached from Create Patient on the Patients list.
The first consultation is the patient's earliest booked appointment, recorded on the appointment booking form. You can reach it from New Booking on the Calendar, or from Book appointment in the quick actions on the patient's record.
The start of treatment comes from the Start new cycle form on the patient's record, and specifically from the Start date on it.
Two habits keep this card honest. Create the patient record when the enquiry actually comes in rather than later in the process, and set the cycle start date to the real start rather than the day you happened to do the data entry.
Opening this card
In wawa, open Insights from the sidebar, then Standard Reports, then the Medical director collection. The card is on the Group efficiency tab of the dashboard there.