Emily Jungheim

Stay away from Northwestern. They're not willing to do out of the box treatment like HGH or steroids (both of which have been helpful for me at our new clinic) and their operations are a nightmare. 6 months to get into the clinic and then an additional 3 to wait for IVF once you're admitted? Parking is also expensive. AND they still require two separate COVID tests per IVF cycle, one before you start stim and one before egg retrieval, that you must take at the hospital. No other clinics in the city are requiring this, and it's a huge pain.

Strengths - TV shows episodes of Great British Baking. I was really well monitored coming out of anesthesia following the egg retrieval and felt really well cared for. They kept me for more than a hour, made sure I could urinate, and just overall kept me well monitored. This was probably the best part of my experience with them. Weaknesses - IUIs are unmonitored and not likely to succeed. Cysts were not monitored. No communication with doctor outside of consults and those were few and far between. The biggest issues: 1) we had very low fertilization rates even with ICSI (next clinic 100% vs 30%). 2) 3 day fresh transfers are just not that common any more because all the data suggest that day 5 and frozen transfers are more likely to implant. Ultimately, we choose to move our remaining embryo to a different practice because we both were convinced WUSTL would kill the embryo and our chances of success with them would be low. Based on the numbers, they do numerous egg retrievals for each success and they have a biased clinic population towards younger (<35 years old) women. Also, they gave us someone else's semen analysis. Finally: billing. We went to the WUSTL FRCM because it was the only clinic my insurance would cover. We had 10k in drugs and 10k in infertility. I got a pre-approval as required by the practice and the insurance company. I asked what our share would be when paying the $600 cycle deposit. I was told they couldn't tell me - it was against policy. We went ahead on good faith. That was a huge mistake. Our IVF cycle with them cost $31,000 including $12,000 in drugs. We were expected to pay the $11,000 difference at full rate - not a plan and not at the negotiated rate with our insurance company. It cost us more to do a cycle with WUSTL FRCM with insurance than with another clinic without insurance.

I honestly do not have a lot to say about this office. Everyone was professional but definitely did not get any warm and fuzzy feelings from them. The techs that drew blood were always very nice and very good at their job