After you’ve decided to enlist the help of a doctor in your quest to become a mother, you still have a huge decision in front of you — which doctor should you choose? The internet is chock full of information about fertility clinics and their doctors, but that information isn’t always reliable. Here are a few trustworthy sources you can turn to in order to uncover facts about a doctor’s success rate, insurance requirements, and bedside manner.
Fertility Success Rates
Fertility Success Rates is a website that handles marketing for fertility clinics, but the reports on the site don’t give undue bias to any particular clinics. Go to FertilitySuccessRates.com and click on the “Reports” button at the top of the page. Use the dropdown menu to select your state. The fertility chart that appears will give you accurate information about clinics’ IVF success rates as well as the total number of cycles the clinic handled in the most recent year.
You can be confident in the provided information because all fertility clinics are required to submit annual reports to the CDC. Fertility Success Rates uses those CDC reports to generate its comparison charts. Keep in mind, however, that the CDC information is usually a year or more behind. A clinic’s staff and success rate may have changed recently.
ZocDoc
ZocDoc doesn’t specialize in pointing patients toward fertility doctors, but it does have a wealth of information on countless care providers across the United States. You can research a specific doctor or search for a doctor according to specialty or the symptoms you’re experiencing. The reviews on the site will give you an idea about the doctor’s bedside manner and how past patients have viewed their experience with that provider.
Perhaps the most useful feature of ZocDoc is that you can narrow the search to include only doctors who will accept your insurance.
Healthgrades
More than 30 million people consult Healthgrades each month before they make an appointment with a doctor. Although the site doesn’t focus specifically on fertility specialists, you can search by doctor type. It is easy to browse through patient reviews of the doctors, too.
The reviews touch on many aspects of the experience you can expect with a doctor, such as the ease of scheduling appointments, staff friendliness, and how well the doctor communicates. Try to lean toward doctors that have a lot of positive reviews, so you don’t end up being fooled by one or two false reports.
HealthGrove
Like Fertility Success Rates, HealthGrove has charts that show clinics’ IVF success rates, but the charts are not as detailed. Pay attention to the “Smart Rating” on the left side of the chart, which gives a clinic an overall rating based on its percentage of multiple births, percentage of transfers resulting in live births, percentage of single births, and number of cycles performed at the clinic.
Finding the right fertility doctor can be difficult, but fortunately, you have some reliable resources at your fingertips.
About Jammie Morey
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