Honesty in Reporting IVF Pregnancy Rates

At Dallas IVF, we report our IVF pregnancy rates in accordance with guidelines established and published by SART, The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. A majority of the programs in the United States which are members of SART are compliant with how they present their data on their individualized websites. Unfortunately, many programs that are members of SART are non-compliant with how they present their data to the public. SART requires that programs report their IVF outcomes by live births and by calendar year.

A common method by which some programs report their data which can be misleading is to give incomplete data, often by reporting positive pregnancy tests, or clinical pregnancies only. For example, consider a program that had 100 patients undergo IVF in women who were ≤ 34 years of age.

How would you interpret this data? Some programs might only report clinical pregnancies per transfer.  They would calculate 50/85 or 58.82% and present that as their pregnancy rates. That looks pretty good, doesn’t it? But the ethical and required way to completely report the data is to report by live birth rate, which would be 38/100, or 38% per cycle start, or 38/85, or a 44.71% live birth rate per embryo transfer.

Honest program: 38% live birth
Misleading program: 58.82% pregnancy rate

It is very easy for an IVF center to mislead the public by presenting themselves as having higher rates then they actually have. At Dallas IVF and most other reputable programs, the IVF data is presented in complete accordance with SART. We encourage patients to compare how a program presents its IVF data on its own website and how it is actually reported on the SART audited website.