Shady Grove Fertility

Initial lab work had the results sent to the clinic but didn't hear anything back to confirm is they were good or not. Wrote nurse in portal and said everything looks good, would have told you if it was otherwise. I thought regardless, I shouldn't have to ask if results were good. Twice I wasn't informed of changes in my protocol and needed to call the emergency line to know my dosage for that evening.

One person explained to me that low morphology meant that we would never conceive a normal child in our own. I realized that this was an uneducated answer and I simply moved on.

I had some blood work done at my Kaiser Permanente provider. Unfortunately no one from shady Grove called to explain the results. But the doctor Garde did make sure the other doctor from Kaiser did explain to me my blood results.

My only complaint is that my nurse forgot to write stat on a bloodwork order which resulted my beta not being available the same day.

The only thing that went wrong was the clinic scheduled my appointment for the Annapolis location and I was suppose to be at the Salisbury location. It has bumped our appointment almost 30 days back, but it was a small mistake with no consequences.

I mentioned this previously, but our initial coordinator was unresponsive and she confused my information with another patient that allegedly had a similar name.

The first nurse we were assigned to failed to schedule the correct bloodwork/prepare the correct order in the system. It ultimately wasn’t an issue because the phlebotomist caught the error and corrected it immediately.

It was only the first inexperienced nurse we had that provided incorrect information about my husband’s fertility issue. She almost caused us to give up entirely until we requested a new nurse and a second opinion.

While overall treatment plans ran smoothly, there were a few instances with room for improvement. The front desk staff didn't always have accurate information on which RE was scheduled to do a particular procedure even a day or two out. As a planner, this kind of information was important to me especially since infertility is a process where patients have so little control over anything. When my RE ordered the use of a dual trigger protocol, I received conflicting instructions from the weekend nursing staff of when the two triggers needed to be done relative to each other and the dosing. Although this got resolved because the day of trigger ultimately fell on a school night, if I were not the type of patient to self-advocate and seek out answers then that cycle may have been jeopardized. For one of my embryo transfers, I did not get notification ahead of the procedure how many embryos survived or their status (e.g., morula, blastocyst, etc.) until we were already in the procedure room. The RE on-call even already prepared paperwork with her plan before indicating to my husband and me what were our options. The RE did end up giving us some time to figure out what to do without pressure but I would have appreciated being informed the morning of about the status and grades of my embryos so that could be in a better place to make a clear-headed decision. Further, calls to inform of bad news were on a few instances saved until the end of the day or even after hours. While one has to admire the fact that my RE wanted to give difficult news himself so as to be available to provide better guidance than the nursing team, the wait was excruciating and unnecessary. A better approach would have been for a nurse or even the front desk can do an initial call or even send an email to say that the RE will call to discuss the results. Lastly, the financial department is very much hit or miss so incorrect information was provided on a few instances. For instance, I was told that PGS testing was covered for at least the biopsy; however, this ended up being denied about 9 months later by insurance. In another instance, I was given the green light to start an IVF cycle despite the fact that the financial department could not confirm whether my insurance had enough to the max coverage sum to fund another IVF cycle. Instead, I had to piece together this mystery myself and then pull out of stimming upon having started the cycle because--to the best of my understanding after many, many calls to all responsible entities--insufficient insurance coverage funds remained. Although it has been over a year, this situation still unsettles me greatly as this could have cost me the opportunity to have another child. In speaking with others, discrepancies of various kinds with SG's financial department are not a rare occurrence.