Learn how and why Hannam Fertility implemented wawa and went live in just 2 months.
Early 2025 Hannam Fertility decided to get started on wawa to improve their patient experience. As part of our onboarding and training of Hannam we visited Hannam in Toronto to onboard their teams in person. We sat down with Leanne Medeiros to talk about Hannam’s vision for the future of fertility patient management and how using wawa supports that.
Read on and watch the video to learn how and why Hannam fertility got started on wawa.
Leanne is the Patient Service Manager at Hannam Fertility Centre, where she has worked in various administrative roles over the years. Since joining in 2015, she has developed a deep connection to the clinic’s mission. “I get a lot of fulfilment and purpose out of my job. Especially being a patient service manager, we are really frontline,” she shares. Hannam Fertility Centre is known for its dedication to patient experience and is the only fertility center in Canada partnered with CCRM, a leading fertility network in the United States.
Hannam views the patient experience as a central part of their service and that effective communication is a key driver of a positive patient experience and success rates. Like many other clinics, Hannam were managing communication across multiple channels and several systems so their workflows for managing and communicating with patients was fragmented. To bring everything into one system will ensure Hannam has a complete picture of their patients, save time for the team, and finally result in a better experience for patients.
“We work really team-based,” Leanne explains. “So we were trying to find something that would help with communication and still be the least disruptive to our workflows and our team structure.” After exploring various options, the team was introduced to wawa. “It checked all the boxes for us. Not just patient communication and minimal workflow disruption, but also introducing a patient portal to really improve the experience. We were sold pretty immediately.”
The clinic’s primary focus is improving communication and the experience and outcomes for patients. Previously, patients relied on phone calls and emails to receive information, leading to inefficiencies. “Using email is not the best option when people have to dig through and try to find this communication, this handout, this appointment, this Zoom link,” Leanne explains. “Making sure everything is in one place will be spectacular.”
Hannam Fertility is starting with patient communication, messaging, and replacing emails. “We’re also rolling out consents and forms, as well as virtual appointments,” Leanne shares. Future phases will include financial management, recording stimulation cycles, and self-booking tools for patients. The result is a complete system where Hannam can manage patients’ fertility journey from end to end which will save them hours of admin time per cycle while improving the experience and results for patients.
The wawa team will help Hannam roll out components of the wawa platform in separate phases to ease the onboarding and reduce potential disruption. We advise most larger clinics to do so as we have great results with this approach that makes it easy to get started quickly and build momentum for change within the organisation — typically when teams start to see positive change they get hungry for more.
Change management was a major consideration for Hannam as it is for most larger clinics. “Nobody likes change,” Leanne admits. “So we had to make people as excited as possible for it.” The team tackled this challenge by engaging managers, fostering enthusiasm among staff, and reinforcing the long-term benefits. “Seeing the demos, it was just so obvious how much this would improve our workflows. That alone got people really excited.”
After socializing the need for change, the combined Hannam and wawa implementation team involved key stakeholders including IT, data teams, and impacted staff, while also hosting town halls and Q&A sessions to prepare for the transition. “Over-communicating was key - keeping everyone informed and excited about the benefits was crucial.”
Hannam’s transition is also supported by wawa’s extensive training and onboarding program. Before the training sessions, the wawa team met with managers of each functional team in Workflow meetings. Here, wawa mapped each teams’ existing workflows and designed the ideal future workflows within wawa.
After mapping the workflows, we build the required integrations and migrate data if relevant. In Hannam’s case we connected wawa to Hannam’s existing EMR to ensure wawa reflected the source of truth and that there will be no double entry. As Hannam rolls out additional elements of the wawa platform we will integrate their accounting systems, lab equipment, witnessing systems and more.
Once the platform is ready, we go through training with each team. For Hannam, we flew to Toronto and sat down with each team to walk them through the platform and train them in their new workflows. The training is combined with ongoing support by our team and documentation of their workflows which they can return to when they have questions.
Eske and Lloyd from wawa fertility training the Nursing team
“I am blown away by how responsive they are, considering we’re in completely different time zones,” she says. “The response time, scheduling meetings, and implementing changes have been incredibly fast. For someone like Dr. Hannam, that’s been really important to keep things moving along”
Initially, Leanne expected the transition to take at least three to six months. “It’s been less than two months, and everything is moving along so realistically and smoothly,” she says. “This isn’t just something we should do - it’s something we have to do.”
Lloyd, Eske and Cecilie from wawa fertility training Hannam’s Finance and Analytics team
Looking ahead, Hannam Fertility envisions fully integrating wawa into its operations. “The more we can get on, the better,” Leanne states. “We want to incorporate financing, record stim cycles, and introduce self-scheduling tools for patients.” In this sense, wawa adds a powerful IVF specific layer on top of Hannam’s current EMR. Wawa becomes the glue between Hannam’s systems, which removes all need for time consuming double entry and enables automation. This will help Hannam save a lot of manual effort and ensure they have a complete picture and activity trail of all patients and each step of their fertility journey. Once Hannam has a crystal clear picture of the entire patient journey they can start to make powerful improvements and redesign their processes which they believe will radically improve the outcomes and experience for patients.
For Leanne, the transition to wawa is both a professional milestone and a major step forward for patient care. “I think at the end of the day, we’ll be really proud of what we’ve implemented here,” she says. “Patient experience has always been our focus, and with wawa, we’ll be able to mitigate issues and really celebrate the positives.”
In an age where data is as valuable as gold, fertility clinics find themselves at the intersection of medical advancements and increasingly complex data security threats. Fertility treatments involve some of the most sensitive personal and medical information a patient can share. Yet, many fertility clinics remain ill-prepared for the real risks associated with data breaches.
March 19, 2025
Emil Dalgård on Thu Apr 10
