You might be surprised by this one. You might not have thought of this one when you were taking a look at which clinic you might like to work with. Today, we're going to be talking about the some steps for how to choose best IVF and other fertility clinic in 2025.
When is it time to seek out for IVF and fertility specialist?
When should you even start looking to work with a fertility specialist? It depends on what you're looking to do at the fertility clinic. If you have been struggling to conceive, the ASRM, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, actually has guidelines on how long you should try naturally based on your age before reaching out to a specialist.
The ASRM recommends that if you are younger than 35 years of age, the female is younger than 35 years of age, you should try to conceive naturally for at least 12 months before reaching out to a clinic to get some testing done. If you're older than 35, they recommend trying for six months before going in to get some testing done.
They recently updated their guidelines in February of 2020 to also include that women that are 40 years or older should come in sooner for testing. They didn't state how many months of trying you should do naturally, but clinics generally recommend about three months if you're 40 years of age or older.
What is infertility?
The ASRM has a define infertility as the failure to achieve a successful pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse or due to an impairment of a person's capacity to reproduce either as an individual or with her or his partner.
For women that are just going in looking for egg freezing, they're looking to preserve their fertility. They're not trying to get pregnant right now. It's a little bit different. You don't have to wait until you're a specific age, fertility declines with age, because egg quality actually declines with age as well.
So the sooner you can go in for testing and speak to a physician about freezing your eggs, the better. So definitely do it while you're younger. You don't have to wait until you're 35 years old. Okay, so let's dive right into the five steps to consider while choosing your IVF clinic or fertility specialist.
Steps in choosing the best IVF and fertility clinic
Step 1: Check with your insurance
I know that not everyone has infertility coverage for treatment or sometimes even for testing, but if you do have insurance coverage for anything to do with infertility, it's a really good place to start just to check in with your insurance and see which clinics are in network for you.
If you skip this step and you actually go working with whichever fertility clinic you want and you find out later that they're out of network, your insurance will definitely pay for less, but sometimes they won't pay for anything at all. So it's better just to check with them ahead of time and make sure that you're working with one of their in-network providers.
If you don't have infertility coverage, that's totally fine. Skip this step. The rest of the steps aren't dependent on having insurance coverage at all.
Step 2: Compare success rates between different IVF or fertility clinics
Annually, fertility clinics actually report their IVF success rates to either the CDC or to SART, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. So you can find these stats online on the CDC's website or on the SART website.
While some clinics report to both, some clinics just report to one. So if you're looking for a particular clinic, you might want to check both websites, but that's where you can find those and you can start to compare based on success rates for your age range.
They're stratified by age, which clinic might be preferable for you. For those of you who are going to be checking out the IVF success rates, I have a little tip when you're looking at the metrics. There are a lot of numbers on there and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to figure out which ones actually might give you the most information.
So a lot of you are going to look on there and you might think you should be looking at the clinical pregnancy rate. That's definitely a good place to start. Always good to take a look at the clinical pregnancy rate.
Then some of you might have thought, oh, there's live birth rate on there. That makes sense, I should look at the live birth rate too. The best metric to look at is the singleton live birth rate.
That's definitely a good metric to look at when you're evaluating which clinic you might be interested in working with. It's important to keep in mind that some of you might be thinking, oh, you know, I'm just going in for testing or maybe I want to have an IUI done, I'm not necessarily looking for IVF. Bear in mind that clinics don't often report their IUI success rates. They don't report them at least to the SART or the CDC.
That reporting is just for IVF, you can always ask them about IUI success rates and what it would be most likely for you and your age and your diagnosis. But it's always good just to take a look on SART and the CDC if you're just doing an IUI or even if you're just looking into egg freezing.
It'll at least give you an idea of how many cycles this clinic does annually and possibly give you an idea about the quality of the lab and how many patients they see that are actually in your age range. So that even might help you decide which clinic you might want to work with, even if you're not necessarily going for IVF.
At Fertility Space in United States of America on their clinic profiles, you'll see that for each clinic we look at, we highlight the singleton live birth rate for the IVF success rates. We get our data from the CDC. The rest of the metrics are on there as well for you to take a look at, but we specifically highlight the singleton live birth rate because that gives you the best indication of not only which clinics are following best practices, but that's the ideal outcome when you're going through artificial insemination or assisted reproductive technology. It's just to get one healthy baby from a cycle.
They try to avoid twins and multiples of higher orders because that can always lead to adverse outcomes for the mother and for the babies. So one baby at a time. So definitely look at the singleton live birth rate.
And for those of you interested about IUI success rates, I mentioned that clinics don't usually report on that to the CDC or to SART. We are going to be doing a post looking at the clinical research to see what the general success rates are for IUI for different patient populations. So keep that in mind.
Look out for that post if you do want a general idea of what the success rates are with intrauterine insemination. So we just said a lot about success rates and they're very important, but just keep in mind that they're not the end-all be-all when you're comparing clinics that you're interested in working with.
There are a lot of reasons why success rates can differ between clinics and it might not always mean that it'll differ for you if you go to one clinic over the other. One reason is the number of cycles between two clinics for one particular reporting year could be vastly different. One clinic could be newer.
One clinic could be outside of the metro area. So they have less number of cycles. So that's something to keep in mind is you might be looking at a really large clinic that does a thousand cycles a year, and then looking at one that only does 300 cycles a year.
That could possibly affect the data and it might not be accurate for what would happen for your particular age range if you went to that clinic. Patient population might also differ between two clinics. So a clinic might see the majority of the patients that they see might be a different age group than you, or they might have a different diagnosis.
That's something to keep in mind as well that could skew the outcomes a little bit one way or the other compared to how the outcomes at that clinic would be for you. Some clinics also take on harder cases. Sometimes they're referred a lot of patients from other fertility clinics where they've had failures in the past, and that can always affect their outcomes as well.
So it's something just to look into to try to understand a little bit more about why each clinic has certain success rates. So definitely look at the success rates and they're important and they can be really informative. But just remember that you can't control for all the confounding factors.
Let's take a look at the next steps as well to help you have a more holistic view of a clinic when you're trying to decide which one to work with. And for everything we mentioned in the post today, just so you know, it's all going to be linked below. So if you did want to check out the CDC and see their success rates or SART or fertility space, or if you wanted to look at those ASRM guidelines for the ages and when you should go in for infertility evaluation, that's all going to be linked below.
Step 3: Check clinic distance
So you might think that choosing a clinic that's a little bit farther away versus a closer one won't really make a difference because you only go in once or twice to check in with the doctor.
But if you're going to be going through infertility treatments or egg freezing, keep in mind that there actually are a lot of early morning appointments and there might be times during a treatment cycle where you have to go in three or four times in a week for early morning monitoring. And you know, if you have to drive further away, that could sort of eat into things that you have to do for your personal life or you know, getting back in time to start work. So just keep that in mind that clinic distance is important.
It's also important to note that some clinics have several locations. You need to figure out which one is the main location and which ones are satellite locations. The reason being is that if you end up going to a clinic and you realize that the closest one to you that you thought you would be going to all the time is a satellite location, you might not be able to have everything done there and find yourself traveling more often to the main location.
So if that's further away, it's just something to be aware of. Satellite locations often have limited hours, limited services, and not all doctors part of a fertility clinic group will go to satellite locations. Sometimes only maybe two out of five of the doctors go to that satellite location.
If you're okay just going in for monitoring and seeing another doctor or a different nurse than you're used to at a satellite location, that's totally fine. Then do it just to let you know that the doctor that you're going to be working with might not actually be the one who's available at satellite locations most often.
Step 4: Review doctors
Once you have a couple of clinics that you're interested in, it's also really important to take a look at the physicians to see which reproductive endocrinologist, so that's a fertility specialist, which one you would like to work with.
A recent study and anecdotal evidence from online actually has found that the reason that a lot of patients chose a specific clinic or even chose to stay with a clinic was due to the quality of the relationship with their physician. So it's really important that when you're taking a look at which physician you want to work with, you check reviews online, you read their bio, perhaps to see if they have a subspecialty within reproductive medicine that they primarily focus on that might match what your diagnosis would be, and then also to check for personality fit.
So schedule, if you can, a couple of consultations with different physicians just to make sure that there's a good personality fit and that your style of communication actually matches. When you're going through infertility treatment, it's not unheard of to be working with a clinic for several months, so you really want to make sure that the person that is guiding you through the process and giving you all your protocols is someone that you can easily communicate with and that you trust to guide you throughout the process.
Step 5: Consider is clinic size
You might be surprised by this one, you might not have thought of this one when you were taking a look at which clinic you might like to work with, but the size of a clinic can actually affect whether you have a good experience there depending on what sort of experience you're expecting for yourself and your personality.
This is one of those things where you really have to know yourself and know if you're the type of person that would prefer working with a larger clinic or a smaller clinic. So we're going to compare the two really quickly just to see reasons why you would want to go for one or for the other and kind of what the pros and cons are.
So generally, larger clinics are known to have more appointment availability. They're also known to have a less personal feel when you go in. Some patients say that they can feel a little bit more like a number and less like a person when they go into a larger clinic because they're a lot busier and you get in and out and you might not see the same nurse or work with the same care team every time that you go in.
Another reason, another difference is that when you're going to a larger fertility clinic, your specific physician, your reproductive endocrinologist might not do all of your procedures himself or herself. So a lot of times the physicians switch daily who's doing IUI that day, who's going to do the egg retrievals, who's going to do embryo transfers. So just keep in mind that if you're okay with that, you might be working with a different physician for some of your procedures.
But for counseling and when you have to go in for consultations, you'll definitely be seeing your physician, but that's just something to keep in mind. Smaller clinics are generally known to have less appointment availability. They might have more limited hours than a larger clinic.
Sometimes they're not open on the weekend or they have more limited weekend hours than a larger clinic would have. So that's something to keep in mind. But smaller clinics also are known to have a more personal feel.
Every time you go in, you're likely to see the same nurse and always see your physician. So you know you're working with the same care team. There are a lot of patients that like that.
They like going in and knowing it's the same people that they're going to be talking to every single time. And when they call, they almost always talk to the same people. That can be really comforting when you're going through the process.
Something that can be less favorable about some smaller clinics, this doesn't happen at all small clinics, but when it comes to IVF cycles, some clinics batch their IVF cycles because they do less rounds of IVF when it comes to their patient population. They sometimes need their cohorts of patients to wait like a month so they can sync everyone up and start a certain number of patients at the same time. So if you don't feel constrained for time when you're going through IVF and you can give yourself a month or so of leeway, then that probably won't affect you or bother you at all.
But just check with those clinics to see if they do batch their IVF cycles and know if that's something that's going to work for you or something that's not going to work for you. It's all about like how it works out for you. It's kind of a unique personal preference thing.
This is more of a general rule of what patients usually say about larger and smaller clinics. So it might not be the case for the clinic that you're interested in, but these are just general characteristics to be aware of so that when you do start looking at fertility clinics and reaching out, you can take these things into account and maybe ask some of these questions just to see what to expect when you're getting started going through the process.
It's better not to be blindsided and just to know these things ahead of time going in so that you're prepared and you know that you're okay with these possible limitations of larger and smaller clinics. Neither is better, they're just different.
Conclusion
So these are our top five tips for how to choose a fertility clinic, but I would be interested to know what is most important to you when looking for a fertility clinic. We didn't mention price and one of the reasons why, if you're curious, is because a lot of times clinics aren't very transparent on their website with their price.
That's something where you'd have to talk to them directly. So I would definitely say that that's kind of later on in the steps when you've narrowed down which clinic you're most interested in, is to give them a call, maybe speak with their financial counselor and go over pricing. So I would say that's one of reasons that that is further down the line, but I recognize that that might be further to the top of the list for some of you for how to choose a clinic.
So I'd be interested to hear what you think is your number one metric. Okay so with these five steps you're equipped to start looking for the IVF and fertility clinic that is best for you.
I'll leave the link down below to the search. You can search hundreds of fertility clinics across the United States there with us, and each clinic profile is going to have the CDC success rates, locations, services offered, doctors available, and then contact info as well. So that's where you can get started.
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