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What To Look For In An IVF Lab

Discover what to look for in an IVF lab as you search for a fertility doctor and clinic

When you’re selecting a fertility specialist, you need to consider more than just the doctor’s credentials, reviews, reputation and personality. You also need to think about the quality of the physician’s practice, which includes the IVF laboratory he or she chooses to use.

Texas Fertility Center works exclusively with the Ovation Fertility lab, one of the largest and most successful reproductive labs in the country. As a result, our Austin fertility center team knows what factors define IVF lab quality.

What should you look for in an IVF lab?

As you start to research a practice and its associated IVF lab quality, you’ll first want to learn more about the services it offers and the technology that it chooses to use.

Every patient is different, which means that there’s no one fertility treatment that will work for everyone. As a result, you want to select a fertility practice that uses an IVF lab that provides a complete suite of laboratory services that range from the basic to the advanced. This list can help you determine what to look for in an IVF lab.

The IVF laboratory for our Austin fertility center offers all these services and more. Additionally, it houses the latest technology to improve patient success.

  • State-of-the-art microscopes to observe cellular development in embryos
  • Time-lapse imaging of embryonic growth and development
  • High-efficiency, clean-room design with HEPA air filtration
  • Battery and generator backups to protect against power failure
  • Advanced freezers for storing frozen eggs, sperm and embryos
  • An electronic witnessing system to ensure proper identification of eggs, sperm and embryos
  • Hardware and software that allow the laboratory to employ artificial intelligence and deep machine learning to optimize embryo selection prior to transfer

As you learn more about fertility practices, you should find out whether they also utilize these different types of technology to support your fertility treatment.

The laboratory staff also influences IVF lab quality

An IVF laboratory is only as good as the people who work there. As a result, you’ll want to find out who is working in the IVF lab that your fertility practice uses.

Size and experience are critical factors when choosing an IVF lab. You should entrust your fertility to experts who do enough cases that they can easily recognize potential challenges that can affect the outcome of your cycle. The Ovation Austin embryologists perform more than 1,200 IVF retrievals per year. Therefore, there is little that they haven’t seen and successfully overcome.

You should also want to choose an IVF laboratory that performs cutting-edge research. This indicates that the embryologists focus on remaining current and sharing their discoveries with the rest of the field.

You may also want to find out whether the IVF lab that you are considering does “batching” of their treatment cycles. Batching means that patients are stimulated together at only certain times of the month or year, so their retrievals all occur around the same time. There is a legitimate question as to whether batching can adversely affect your outcome. Batching is typically performed by small programs that aren’t busy enough to afford full-time embryologists.  When selecting a fertility clinic, you want it to work with a full-service IVF lab staffed with full-time, highly trained professionals.

Contact us if you have more questions about what to look for in an IVF lab, or if you’d like to schedule an appointment. Our Austin fertility center has the experience and the Ovation Austin IVF lab produces the quality outcomes you need to help you move from patient to parent.