Irene Moy

Kaiser's SART results are excellent, some of the best in the area. A downside is that there is a very very long wait for meetings with the doctor and for scheduling treatments. IUI treatments were easy to schedule, but it sounds like IVF process from consult to transfer can be very, very long.

The Kaiser SF clinic is ok, if I had another feasible option I would consider it though. It feels that overall there is not enough time to get questions answered and I always feel rushed by the providers and medical staff.

Be prepared to see a large number of heavily pregnant women in the waiting room. It can be upsetting at times. Aim for appointments first thing in the morning to ensure you are in and out on time. As the day goes on, they tend to fall behind schedule.

Clinic work flow was always very organized, staff were friendly, and access to seeing a provider was never an issue. The ability to communicate with provider via the Kaiser's health online was a major plus! It decreases unnecessary calls dn increases relationship trusts with the personal one--on-one conversations via messages.

The clinic, being Kaiser, has its limitations including the level of patient education you receive, the inflexibility around being on the pill in preparation for the scheduled cycles, and the feeling that I was being "shuffled through." I once received an email from a nurse addressing me by someone else's name. The substance of the email was appropriate to me but it was very much a "copy paste" scenario. I could deal with all of this though until we encountered some issues with the embryology lab that have me looking into other clinics. In short, we lost one high quality PGS normal embryo because, as we were told, there was a very rare instance when the embryologist was unable to remove all of the oil from the embryo before freezing, rendering it unlikely to thaw successfully. Our doctor and the head embryologist explained what happened very thoroughly and patiently. We were offered a sympathetic "these things happen" but they did not claim responsibility nor did they offer a free cycle. I did another retrieval and our next PGS normal embryo had to be thawed, re-biopsied, and refrozen because the first biopsy came back as "No DNA present." I don't know where the breakdown occurred this second time (whether at Kaiser or the genetic testing lab) but it's enough of a question mark that I have trouble trusting the Kaiser lab. We will likely have further conversations with Kaiser.

It's Kaiser. With this comes a lack of education and information, but it's great for all procedures and medications. Just make sure to do your research or ask more questions. Also, there are also sometimes long waits to be seen. For example, IUIs are scheduled at 10am and the last two times, I haven't been seen until 11. All women are prepped at the same time and then have to wait until their turn in the room.

My biggest beef was with Kaiser itself. Here's a list of the things I didn't like or felt could be improved: -It's a little thing, but the Kaiser clinic is called the Infertility and Reproductive Endocrinology department. I don't need the reminder that I was having infertility issues; the clinic I switched to (at a different hospital) was called the Center for Reproductive Health. It's a little thing, but really made a difference to me. -For some reason, Kaiser has regular OB patients check-in at the same desk where the fertility patients check in and wait for their appointments. I wasn't overly bothered by this, but it did strike me as very insensitive to have visibly pregnant women standing in line and checking in for appointments in front of women (and men) struggling with fertility issues. -It drove me crazy that almost every single appointment I had scheduled I was seen late. Sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes as long as a half hour. I showed up for an IUI appointment one Saturday a half hour ahead of time because I had been running other errands in the neighborhood, and wasn't seen until nearly an hour after I'd been told my appointment was. I found out later that the timing of when you are seen for an IUI has to do with when the sample from the man was taken or dropped off, but no one ever explained that to me when I had my appointments and all the waiting around with no explanation made a stressful situation worse. -Overall, I felt I got no guidance from the Kaiser fertility team regarding my treatment. It was all left up to me to ask, "What's do you think about what's happening, should we keep trying this next month or should we try another approach, etc." If I didn't ask these questions, no one followed up with me and I would miss a cycle.

Kaiser is highly regimented. It's very efficient and relies on protocol, which works most of the time. But it works less well in terms of listening to patients and responding to them.

Strengths - it's Kaiser, so if you're there, you probably have some kind of insurance coverage, which is always a good thing with infertility! Weaknesses - super expensive meds at the Kaiser pharmacy, I wish I had had some advanced notice so I could have shopped around earlier, but I needed the trigger that day, so no time to shop around or wait for meds to ship!