Understanding your insights

You can’t know you’re getting better unless you measure. The Insights tab is that measure — a quiet read on how your operating is going, built only from the cases you log. Nothing is entered twice; it’s all derived from your logbook.

It’s meant to be glanced at. Open it, take in where you are in a few seconds, and get on with your day.

Five pages, one question each

Insights is split into five short pages so each one answers a single question, rather than crowding everything onto one screen. A tab bar across the top moves between them; a strip of years (and an All option) lets you pick what period you’re looking at — tap a year and every page below re-reads in place. Picking All doesn’t just add every year into one big pile; it switches to a view across your whole career, which we explain below.

Year review — the at-a-glance hub. The whole year in one screen: your case count, a month-by-month bar, your busiest and quietest months, and short previews that link into the other four pages.
Activity — when you operate. A calendar-style heatmap of cases per week (built from your real case dates, never invented), plus your theatre, surgical, and clinic rhythm.
Case mix — your mix of work over time, shown as a flowing band, with the hours you’ve spent in each category.
Trajectory — am I improving? The second half of the year against the first, your operating rates, and how a few key measures are moving.
Fair return — is the work paying off? Your earnings against what you generated and the agreed share, and anything a hospital still owes you. Money lives only here — it’s never the headline anywhere else.

A few honest notes on the numbers:

We say “operative hours,” not “hours worked” — we can only see the time inside your logged cases, not clinics, admin, or on-call.
Anything we can’t yet measure precisely is labelled “(estimate).” As you log more, estimates are replaced by your real numbers.
Pages never show an empty or pointless chart. If you operate at one hospital, you won’t see a “by hospital” split — it would tell you nothing. You only see cuts that mean something for your practice.

“Your move” — the part that matters

A number on its own doesn’t help. Knowing your hours-per-list slipped doesn’t make it better; knowing what to do about it does.

So the insight that needs your attention carries a “Your move” — a single, specific next step, marked in amber so your eye finds it first. For a slip, it points at the lever (“lists are starting later — holding the 9:00 start recovers about half an hour”). For a strength, it tells you how to protect it.

There is only ever one amber move per page — the one that matters most for that page’s question. The point isn’t to make you feel watched; it’s to turn “here’s a problem” into “here’s what I’d do next.”

More cases, more insight

Under your headline numbers is a small line like “4 cases to your seasonality view.” Some insights simply need more data before they mean anything — you can’t see your busy and quiet seasons from two weeks of cases.

So as your logbook grows, new views unlock. The bar shows what’s next and how close you are. It’s not a nag — it’s a promise that the work you’re already doing keeps paying off in sharper insight.

One unlock is worth knowing about: your pace versus a typical time needs you to record how long cases take. Add operative times for a while and that comparison appears — it’s the one thing we can’t estimate for you.

Cases and procedures

Your headline numbers count cases — one case is one trip to theatre, one anaesthetic, one sitting. That’s the honest unit of your work.

But a single case can involve more than one procedure. So where that happens, your case-mix adds a quiet line — “105 cases · 118 procedures” — and a short “by procedure” breakdown that counts every procedure, not just the main one. That’s where a second procedure done alongside the main one finally shows up. The two numbers are always measured over the same cases, so they never disagree, and the procedure line only appears when you’ve actually had cases with more than one procedure — otherwise it would just repeat the case count.

On comparison

Where you see a comparison — your time against a typical time, or where your volume sits among your specialty — it’s there for orientation, not a scoreboard. We will never rank surgeons by how many cases they do. Volume is context about the world you work in, never a target. The questions worth asking are about you: am I better than last month? Where should I focus next?

Over the years

When you pick All, Insights stops totting up one giant lifetime number and asks the better question instead: am I getting better or worse? It’s the one read you can only get once you’ve logged across more than a single year.

At the top you’ll see a plain verdict — getting better, holding steady, or slipping — with the handful of changes that back it up. Below that, the measures that matter are laid out one by one, each with the direction it’s been heading over your career: how your case volume is trending, what you earn for each hour you operate, how your mix of work has shifted, and a few more in the same spirit. A decline is shown as a quiet downward line, never alarm-red — it’s information, not a telling-off.

A word on years that aren’t finished or aren’t there:

A part-logged year is scaled up to a full-year equivalent before it’s compared, and marked “(est)” so you know it’s a fair-comparison figure rather than an exact one. This is so a year you only logged half of never looks like a bad year next to your full ones — it’s measured as if you’d kept the same pace all year.
A year with no data for a particular measure is simply left as a gap. We won’t guess a number where there’s nothing to go on; the line just picks up again when your records do.

As ever, pages that have nothing meaningful to show at this scale stay hidden, and a measure we can’t yet pin down precisely still carries its “(estimate)” label.

Going deeper

Each page is itself the deeper view of a question previewed on the Year review hub — tap a preview row there to jump straight to the page that explains it. Switch the year (or All) at the top to see how any of this has changed over your career. Each page stays focused on its one question; you move between them with the tab bar.