Boston IVF - The Syracuse Center

Anna at the front desk is always warm and welcoming. The phlebotomists are fantastic and very professional. The financial coordinator Abby is incredibly knowledgeable about the insurance processes, submitting PA requests, getting medications approved, and dealing with billing issues.

I have loved working with my doctor and nurse, but have some major problems with the bureaucratic and patient-unfriendly manner in which the clinic is run. The clinic does not have portal messaging enabled and requires almost everything to be done over the phone, which makes things incredibly stressful for people who don't work from home/in a private area. Every time I call the clinic with a question or an update, I get a live front-desk person who needs my name and DOB--but then she can help with very few things and almost always routes me to someone else's voicemail, so it's really no different than calling a phone tree that routes to voicemail. I can almost never get a live human to answer my question. I've also had different staff members tell me different things about when I'd get results or start treatment, and I've felt forgotten about--like when a follow-up appointment was never scheduled, and the doctors' requested follow-up actions not performed, after we did our initial round of testing. The nurses' line promises a call back the same day, and while most of the time this has happened, it hasn't always. The office, though small, is a complex bureaucracy to navigate. They have divided tasks narrowly between different staffers, which means you get a lot of "that's not my job" and have to hop from person to person and often land in voicemail/phone-tag hell. For example, when it was time to schedule our initial tests, I scheduled mine and then asked to schedule my husband's, and the nurse curtly said she didn't do that, but she could have someone call us about that. No one ever did. It seemed there was only one person who could schedule semen analysis, and my husband got transferred to her voicemail and waited days for her to call back, playing phone tag. Limiting such a simple task to one person really made our lives difficult. Another example is billing--the billing person does not order the medications, which makes sense, but as a result she cannot answer general questions about medication prices and insurance, and I don't see why she can't learn the basics so that we can talk to one person about the initial financial aspects--or it would have been helpful if she could have at least transferred us to someone else to talk to, so we could actually get an answer to our question. Even the first time I called to set up an initial appointment, I got transferred to the "initial appointments" line and had to leave a voicemail and wait by my phone. The physical atmosphere could be more relaxing. I really wish that for the early-morning appointments, they'd put the TV on mute with closed captions, rather than blaring it--I'm trying to relax before my appointment/procedure--and having a loud TV screaming into my ear at 7:30 AM is not great for that. And I do wish they'd ask their staffers to put pictures of their children in areas where patients--who don't need to be reminded about other people's children--cannot see them.

When I was getting treatment, the clinic was newly-established. The clinic itself was mostly easy to navigate. One challenge is that (at least at the time that I was receiving treatment), there wasn't a large enough patient population to support an embryologist on-site. This meant needing to sync up cycles with all patients undergoing retrieval or transfer so that an embryologist could come from Boston and do all the procedures in a single week. This led to a prolonged course of treatment that I hadn't expected.

This is a new clinic with a great staff. Abby at the front desk is cheerful and Mel is a wonderful embryologist who spent a bit of time to assist with moving my embryos across town and then prepping them for transfer. The blood and ultrasound team is also small, so you see the same faces often and they are all very good!

The appointments that are just to talk about results and such are through zoom. Which for me living an hour away is very convenient. So if you live a while out don’t be afraid to ask for tele-visits if possible.

Its a homey feeling clinic. You don't know what you're in for when you walk in. The receptionist didn't know anything, and took 10 minutes to check me in. It is near impossible to find the office as its inside a huge building and when you use your GPS, good luck getting there. and The receptionist when you call for help can't help at all.

Clean office but they only care about money, not patients. You're COD which is fine but once I tried to pay and they told me I had no balance. When I left the office they called/emailed me IMMEDIATELY asking me to clear up my balance that didn't exist a few minutes earlier. If only they called with MEDICAL information as quickly as they called to collect money.

You don’t meet the doctor often the nurses seem to do everything. The nurses and receptionist are literally amazing! So welcoming and personable! Their scheduling is super early and doesn’t work around many work schedules (it did mine; thank god) but i highly recommend this clinic

Boston ivf in Syracuse is a brand new clinic and it is beautiful. The staff is so friendly and welcoming and I have very little wait time when I get there. They have been great about scheduling appointments and taking my phone calls