How do you choose a fertility clinic? What questions can a lay person ask to begin to understand the quality of an IVF Lab? Quality goes beyond pregnancy success rates to new technologies, inspections and accreditations, staff experience and more! Find out what to ask.
In the industry, we alway say, START with SART! The federal government requires fertility clinics to report IVF treatment cycle success rates, and you can find those statistics on the SART website. It also has a tool that allows prospective patients to search for fertility clinics by ZIP code, state or region; plus, women can plug in information such as their age, height, weight, and how many prior births they’ve had to predict their chances of success with assisted reproductive technology.
Most IVF programs are proud of their results and may list them on their website, however, whatever they are advertising should match the number of cycles and the outcomes reported to SART or found in the CDC Assisted Reproductive Technology Fertility Clinic Success Rates Report.
Look for verified lab accreditation on the CDC report or in the actual facility itself, it will usually be posted in plain site. Find out who the inspecting agency is, the College of American Pathologists? The Joint Commission?
A possible thing to note could be to look at what percentage of their patients are in your age range, or have the same infertility diagnosis as you do.
Consider how the clinic’s staff talk to you, what they say – how professional does the care feel? Use all of your senses. Is the care personalized and professional enough so you feel comfortable?” An example of dehumanizing behavior: some clinics have an application process to decide if you should be treated there.
- Failed to call in prescriptions to pharmacy
- Lost paperwork
- Lost appointments
- Failed to call with results
- Failed to order appropriate test
Look on Indeed, Glassdoor, or other job sites to get an idea of staff turn over and what staff have to say. Find out how experienced the providers are, how well-trained they are and how long have they been there? As with other fields of medicine, experience matters in reproductive medicine. Providers should be fellowship-trained and board-certified in the field, both of which are the standard. Also inquire how long the medical providers have been at the facility. If there seems to be high staff turnover, there could be leadership and organizational issues at the clinic.
Look for clinics that can offer the latest treatments and protocols. These might include blastocyst transfer, freeze all cycles, mini or low STIM IVF, preimplantation genetic screening of embryos and single embryo transfer, ERA or endometrial receptivity assay testing.
The introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) has resulted in a choice of fertilization methods between conventional in vitro fertilization by insemination (IVF) and fertilization by ICSI. Fertilization by insemination relies on the normal healthy functions of the sperm, and those can be bypassed by injection directly into the oocyte. Severe oligospermia (low sperm concentration), asthenozoospermia (low motility) or teratozoospermia (abnormal morphology) are all good reasons to use ICSI. However, many clinics routinely use 100% ICSI no matter what the diagnosis is. In the case of IVF, unexpected complete fertilization failure (CFF) in an individual cycle is a well-known phenomenon and is a risk to the success of IVF cycles.