Free tool
What phone tag on dose changes costs your clinic
Put in your cycle starts, your calls per cycle and your coordinator hourly cost to see what the callback loop is costing every month.
Free tool, no sign up
How many active cycles can one coordinator carry
Enter your monitoring pattern and the minutes each touchpoint takes to see the caseload your current staffing can actually hold.
Caseload in a fertility clinic is not a headcount, it is a touchpoint count. One patient on a long protocol with six monitoring visits and three dose changes generates a different load from a patient on a low dose antagonist cycle who sails through with two adjustments. Counting bodies on the board tells you almost nothing about whether Thursday afternoon is going to hold.
This calculator converts your board into minutes. It asks how many visits a cycle involves, how long each visit costs the coordinator across the results call, the dose instruction and the documentation, and how many fixed minutes each cycle needs outside monitoring for calendar build, pharmacy and insurance work. Then it tells you how many concurrent cycles your available coordinator hours support.
Your result
Coordinator minutes per stimulation cycle
109
Total coordinator time one cycle consumes from baseline to trigger.
Team hours per week the current board demands
30.9
Assumes a stimulation cycle spreads its work across about two weeks.
Active cycles one coordinator can hold
19.8
Concurrent cycles, not cycles completed over the course of a month.
Spare cycle capacity across the team
5.6
A negative number means the board is already running on overtime.
Anything under about four cycles of headroom means one sick day or one heavy start week puts confirmations at risk.
Why hours per week is the number people get wrong
The instinct is to enter forty, or thirty six after meetings. That is not what the calculator is asking. It wants the hours genuinely available for cycle coordination after the coordinator has covered the floor during morning monitoring, sat in on a new patient consult, handled a post retrieval call and finished charting. In most small clinics the honest figure lands between fifteen and twenty five.
If you have never measured it, take one coordinator and have her mark her day in half hour blocks for a week, tagging each block as cycle work or something else. The result is almost always lower than leadership assumed, and it is the single input that moves this calculator most.
Reading the headroom number before you hire
Headroom is the buffer between what your board demands and what your team can carry. Positive and comfortable means a heavy start week is absorbable. Close to zero means the system works only when nothing goes wrong, and in fertility something goes wrong most weeks: a patient responds slowly and needs two extra monitoring visits, a shipment is delayed, a physician wants an extra estradiol.
Before adding a coordinator, test whether reducing minutes per touch gets you the same headroom for less money. Cutting nine minutes per monitoring visit to six, by sending the dose change in writing with a confirmation instead of playing voicemail tag, changes the caseload arithmetic substantially. Hire when that has already been squeezed, not before.
Questions about this calculator
Why does the calculator assume a two week cycle span?
Because most stimulation cycles run somewhere between nine and fourteen days from baseline to trigger, so two weeks is a fair spread for the work a single cycle generates. If your protocols run notably longer, including estrogen priming or a long down regulation, raise your fixed minutes per cycle to compensate rather than trying to change the span.
Should frozen transfer cycles count on the board?
Yes, but they usually carry fewer monitoring visits and fewer dose changes than a fresh stimulation cycle. The cleanest approach is to run the calculator twice, once with your fresh cycle numbers and once with your transfer numbers, then add the two weekly hour figures together and compare that total to your team capacity.
What caseload number should we be aiming for?
There is no national standard, and any figure quoted as one should be treated with suspicion, because it depends entirely on monitoring pattern and how much of the communication is written. What matters is your own arithmetic plus a real buffer. Aim for headroom you could lose to one absence without confirmations going unchecked.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The cycle start coordination checklist
Everything a coordinator should verify between the physician deciding a protocol and the patient confirming her trigger time, in the order it happens.
Test that figure on a stimulation cycle
The result above came out of your own inputs, so the honest next question is whether it survives contact with your patients. In a demo we take one cycle, build the medication calendar, push a dose change after physician review and show the unconfirmed list a coordinator would work from at four in the afternoon. That is the quickest way to find out whether the minutes per touch you entered would really fall.