Penn Fertility Care

Strengths - nice offices, testing on site, good stats of success, overall friendly staff Weaknesses - Takes a long time to get an appointment with a doctor, book well in advance so you don't experience a gap like I did Proactively follow up if you want more information on treatment plans and test results because someone might not follow up with you

It takes awhile to get an appointment to see a doctor even as an existing patient. Even when I asked for the doctor to call me I received a call from a nurse instead. And any questions I had, had to go through the nurse. I was told on more than one occasion by the nurse that they wouldn't try something new, just to be told later that the doctor okayed it. It was extremely disorganized and frustrating.

I don't recall any strengths at Penn. Looking back we really had a terrible experience all around. Their weaknesses are incorrect location scheduling, communication, billing, and treatment strategy. We never saw our doctor in person for any treatment or procedure, and truly felt like a number.

Modern facilities. Terrible bedside manner of the primary nurse and Dr. Shah. It drive often drove me to the point of leaving appointments in tears because of how insensitive their treatment was- from not describing the physical pain of different procedures well enough to acting inconvenienced to have to answer patient questions.

Terrible. We hated our experience with this group. They screwed up appointments for us, booked us at wrong offices, weren’t watching protocols closely. We felt like I was the only advocate for our treatment. The didn’t even call us back after bloodwork pre IUI!

The clinic is often fairly quiet and pretty efficient. There's free parking, although the lot is very busy/tight after the very early morning. All procedures must be done at the downtown office and procedures are done by whoever is on-call/working that day, not by your doctor. The nurses at the front desk never learn your name or get to know you. There are no discounts for procedures.

Penn Fertility will always have a lot of patients because some large employers in the Philadelphia area cover services there. It is a well-respected program and most of the physicians I interacted with are excellent. However, the clinic does not care at all about patient satisfaction or patient experience. The financial coordinators are particularly difficult to work with - they are rude, don't return calls, and are unwilling to help unless they are chasing you down for a bill. If this clinic is the only one covered by your insurance, you will likely get what you need. But if you are paying out of pocket, I would think about going elsewhere.

Though we were happy with our doctors, we were not happy with the clinic as a whole and have since left the clinic. We felt that we rarely saw our doctor. In over a year Penn Fertility Care, we saw our official IVF doctor maybe three or four times total, including consultations.

The positives of Penn is that if you work there, the insurance coverage is fantastic. We received 6 covered IUIs, 2 retrievals and three transfers all through my insurance plan. They also have several locations and you can go to any one you want depending on whats most convenient for you. Most of the time, for the early morning blood draw/ultrasound visits leading up to IUI or retrieval, they are mostly on time. On the other side of the coin, the process for getting "bad news" isn't great. Usually the ultrasound tech just says everything is fine but if it's not then they literally don't say anything and on the way out say "the doctor will come in and speak to you." It just was very anxiety provoking. Maybe this is true of all clinics, I don't know, but I really didn't like how it was handled. Additionally, the weekend appointments sometimes ran 90 minutes behind for a simple blood draw and/or ultrasound. I also very much felt like a dollar sign. The financial person was entirely unprofessional and had no empathy at all for us. Even though we had mailed a check which had not yet been received she basically threatened to cancel our embryo transfer if we didn't pay the bill for our embryo storage. We had literally received the bill earlier that week and mailing a check was the only option for payment. It wasn't an issue with being able to pay or not wanting to pay - they just literally hadn't received it yet. I never really felt connected to my care team or like anyone really cared about us (for the most part) and I was under their care for almost 3 years.

Penn Medicine has multiple locations which is nice and you can go to any of them. My primary location usually ran pretty well on schedule for blood work/ultrasound appointments in the morning when prepping for egg retrieval or IUI. The space was light and bright and always clean. The downsides are that many of their staff need to be trained with regard to compassion. The financial person was extremely condescending and really didn't seem like she understood how emotional the infertility experience can be. She didn't respond in a timely manner, didn't get an IUI request submitted on time causing us to have to cancel and generally wasn't very nice. Additionally, there as never any discussion of mental health, how I was feeling or any suggestion for counseling. I was lucky enough to already being care with a trusted provider but many people are not and that should have been discussed.

The clinic are clean. They will not transfer your medical records to new practice. so try to get all records when you are their patient. It is well run clinic as it is part of Penn fertility care. They run many centers in Philadelphia region, so you can go to Market st, Wash. Sq and also in Radnor. Wait time at clinic can be long and weekend lab work is only done in Market st. location.

I get the impression that this clinic may be more concerned with their statistics than with their patients. There are about a dozen doctors and in my time there, I saw every single doctor once for one procedure or another. After over a year at the clinic, I still felt like a new patient.

long wait, but everyone was nice enough. they did not have a dr doing the ultrasound, but an ultrasound technician. my next clinic ahd a dr doing it. i have nothign else to say but it wont let me click next until i hit 200 characters

I think that Penn is VERY expensive. When I met with their financial rep, she said that IUIs typically bill out at $5,000. Also, they billed all of my diagnostic testing as 'infertility' so my tests started billing against my insurance lifetime maximum. I felt like they were sucking my few insurance dollars dry. In terms of the clinic, it is clean and typically runs on time. It was rare that I had to wait over 15 minutes.

Overwhelmed and unavailable at times which caused undue stress to patients. The clinical was flexible with scheduling and the turn around time from initial visit to treatment was quick. Wouldn't advise a young patient to go here as my case wasn't considered to be as bad as others which I feel often the severity of my case was overlooked and I was often told your young so you have time

Penn Fertility is obviously a well regarded clinic but it treats so many people that it's hard not to feel like just a number. No one there knows you or remembers your name, even after multiple visits. Costs are very high for the level of care.