Something important we have learned is, fertility clinics don’t do this because they’re chaotic. They do it because they care deeply about patient safety, team workflows, data quality, regulatory requirements, finance, lab processes, and everything in between. When you’re running a fertility clinic, everything feels important. And in your day-to-day world, that’s true.
But in an implementation? It’s a recipe for exhaustion, frustration, and very little actual progress.
Over the last years at wawa, I’ve seen the same pattern play out across countries and clinic types. The clinics that fly through implementation are not always the biggest, the best-resourced, or the most tech-forward. They are the ones willing to prioritise, clearly, ruthlessly, unapologetically, and then protect those priorities like their success depends on it. Because it does.
Let me explain.
When everything is critical, nothing gets done
Every implementation starts with a long wish list. And I understand it. You’ve been using an outdated EMR for ten years. Your lab system hasn’t been updated since your first embryologist bought their first iPhone. Finance is juggling invoices in 12 different places. And the patient journey feels like 15 PDFs glued together.
So when you finally get the chance to modernise, you want to fix everything. But momentum dies the moment phase 1 tries to become phase 1–3 squeezed into one heroic sprint. Suddenly care teams don’t know what matters first, meetings lose focus, and we end up solving edge cases before the core workflows are even live.
Clarity is oxygen. Scope creep is quicksand.
Leaders set the priorities or the different teams will
One of the biggest surprises to clinics is that their teams will fill the vacuum if leadership doesn’t define what’s in scope. I’ve seen it so many times:
- If leaders don’t choose a priority, the nurses will choose theirs.
- The embryologists will choose theirs.
- The finance team will choose theirs.
- Admin will choose theirs.
- And the implementation team ends up trying to build five different roads at once.
Spoiler: we will build none of them. The most successful clinics have one thing in common: Leadership alignment.
When leaders agree on what’s happening now and what’s happening later, the rest of the clinic network falls into rhythm. And the relationship with the implementation team becomes a partnership, not a tug-of-war.
Protecting the team from chaos is a leadership skill
Fertility care is already intense. Adding a system transition on top of daily operations is no small thing. And I say this with all the love in the world: nurses, embryologists, and finance teams do not need any additional confusion in their lives. When priorities aren’t clear, people drown. When priorities are clear, people actually relax, even if the change is big.
I’ve seen clinics halve their implementation time simply because leadership made one decision:
“We will master these workflows first. Everything else waits.”
You could feel the room exhale.
Suddenly people had space to learn, ask questions, and build confidence without 50 competing tasks swirling in the background.
The power of sequencing (or: why doing less actually gets you more)
Some clinics think prioritising means sacrificing progress. It’s the opposite. When we deliver phase 1 cleanly, core clinical flows, patient intake, essential finance, lab basics, everything after becomes easier, because the foundation is stable.
Teams feel the success.
Confidence grows.
Workflows start to click.
And then phase 2 becomes something teams actually look forward to, not fear.
I once had a clinic that insisted on doing everything in phase 1. (Everything. Including things they weren’t even sure they wanted.) We eventually narrowed it down. We launched clean. They saw the impact. And suddenly their staff were sending me messages asking, “When can we do the next phase?” That’s the magic of good sequencing: progress creates appetite.
The truth we don’t always say out loud
Implementations don’t fail because clinics don’t care. They fail because clinics care about too many things at once. The clinics that win understand something simple but powerful:
Priorities are not a list. They are a decision. A decision about what matters now. A decision about what can wait. A decision about how to protect your people from unnecessary noise.
A decision about how quickly you want to move. And a decision about the story you want your team to live through during change. Because when everything is urgent, nothing is clear. And when nothing is clear, nobody moves.
The real secret
If I could give every clinic one piece of advice before starting: Make fewer things a priority.
Then treat those few things like they’re non-negotiable. That’s how you get fast implementations, strong adoption, calmer teams, and a system that truly becomes the new home of the clinic, not just another project.
And trust me: your future phases will thank you.
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