SART Data: Understanding Fertility Clinic Success Rates

In November, we finalized our annual SART data. SART is an acronym that stands for, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. SART is an important organization that helps accumulate data from IVF and infertility clinics all across the country, and it provides a way for patients—or potential patients—to look at pregnancy outcomes per clinic.

It has important information on there about outcomes, and the number of cycles, of number of egg retrievals, number of transfers, and pregnancy outcomes for patients stratified by age.

Now, the outcome information is important, but I do recommend that all potential patients and current patients talk to their providers about the SART outcomes to help interpret the data.

Although it may seem rather straightforward to interpret it, there are subtle nuances within it as to the way that it's reported. For instance, if somebody happens to do one IVF cycle and has one normal embryo but they choose to do a second cycle to accumulate more embryos for the future, we call that family-building, or embryo banking. It could look as if somebody needed to do two cycles in order to achieve a pregnancy, when in reality they may not have needed to do two cycles, however, they chose to.

Other outcomes to look at are:

1. The number of cycles done
2. The number of embryos that are frozen
3. Live birth rates

Having a conversation with your doctor about your clinic, about volume, the number of cycles they do, as well as their outcomes, is important, because there are advantages of going to a clinic that does many cycles, whereas there are definitely advantages of going to a clinic that does fewer cycles.

Deciding what is the best option and potential outcomes for each individual patient is important, however, discussing with your doctor if you have any questions is even more important.

Hopefully this was helpful information. At OC Fertility, we are proud to be a SART affiliated partner, and we look forward to seeing our data finalized in the upcoming months.

Author

Dr. Nidhee Sachdev Nidhee Sachdev, MD has trained among the most prestigious and diverse medical programs in the country, including fellowship training in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the prestigious New York University (NYU) Langone Fertility Center in New York City where she conducted research on preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) and the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she earned the academic distinction of chief resident in obstetrics and gynecology, and trained under a top recurrent pregnancy loss expert. Dr. Sachdev is passionate about providing individualized, collaborative patient care. She started her medical career right here in Orange County, earning her Doctor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine.