The quarterly KPI pack
Contract review is next week. The employer wants to see performance against the KPIs in the contract: days from referral to first appointment, days from appointment to report, and the proportion within target. Your operations manager exports the case list, adds columns, works out the working days between dates, removes the cases where the employee cancelled, and argues with herself about whether the clock starts when the referral arrived or when it was complete.
The pack is built by hand for each contract, and each contract defines things slightly differently. By the time it is finished, the numbers describe a quarter nobody can change.
Why turnaround is so hard to measure
The clinical system stores appointments and reports. It does not know your contract terms, and it does not record the moments that contracts actually measure. Those moments are often in emails.
- The date a referral became complete is not recorded anywhere, only the date it arrived.
- Contracts differ on calendar days versus working days, and on when the clock starts.
- Agreed pauses, such as the employee cancelling or withholding consent, are noted in free text.
- Cases are only reviewed at the end of the quarter, when a breach has already happened.
- Each account manager has their own spreadsheet method.
What manual KPI reporting costs
Days of senior time each quarter go into producing figures. The figures are open to challenge because the method is hard to show. Most importantly, you find out about breaches after the fact, when the only thing left to do is explain them.
There is also a fairness problem inside your own team. When a report is late because an employee rescheduled twice, the clinician looks slow in the figures unless someone remembers to exclude it. Staff start keeping their own notes to defend themselves, which is more admin on top of the admin.
| Measure | What the contract may say | What you need recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Referral to appointment | Working days from complete referral | Complete date, first offer date |
| Appointment to report | Days from consultation to report sent | Consultation date, sent date |
| Pauses | Clock stops for employee-caused delay | Pause reason, start and end |
| Within target | Share of cases meeting each measure | Per case pass or fail with reasons |
How we build turnaround tracking
- Each contract's KPIs are set up as definitions: which dates, calendar or working days, bank holidays, and which pause reasons stop the clock.
- Key dates are recorded as they happen: referral received, referral complete, appointment offered, appointment held, report signed, report released.
- Pauses are recorded with a reason from a fixed list, so they are applied consistently and visible to the employer.
- Every open case shows its status against each KPI. Cases approaching a target appear on a daily at-risk list for your team.
- Quarterly or monthly packs are generated per contract from the same data, with the case list behind every figure.
- Employers can be given a view of their own KPIs if you want that.
The at-risk list is the part that changes behaviour. It is ordered by how close each case is to breaching, and it says what is holding the case up: no appointment offered yet, report not started, awaiting sign-off. An administrator can act on the top of the list first thing each morning.
Where your clinical system already records some of these dates, we read them from it. Where it cannot, we add the missing steps around it.
The difference at the next contract review
The pack is generated rather than built, and every figure can be traced to the cases behind it. More importantly, your team spent the quarter working from an at-risk list, so there are fewer breaches to explain. Disagreements about pauses are settled by the recorded reason and date.
Your operations manager gets back the days she used to spend in Excel, and spends them on the cases that are about to go wrong.
Is your KPI reporting like this?
- KPI packs are built in spreadsheets from exported case lists.
- Each contract's KPIs are calculated a little differently by different people.
- The date a referral became complete is not recorded.
- Breaches are discovered at quarter end.
- Employers challenge your figures and the method is hard to show.