Affording IVF

Fertility treatments can add up. Especially if you end up paying for a series of treatments that may or may not lead to a baby. While the price tag is an important factor in choosing the best clinic for you and your family, be sure to also consider the quality of the fertility clinic and their success rates.

Because there are so many factors in getting pregnant and having a healthy baby, the best fertility clinics will often suggest buying a multi-round package for IVF. This package can take the stress off you as you go through IVF. Freeze-all IVF cycles, where your eggs are retrieved, fertilized, and grown to day 5-7 then frozen in a highly successful vitrification process can be a cost savings for multiple reasons. First, your clinic can perform a PGT-A biopsy to test and make sure the embryo’s chromosomes are correct which improves the success rate and limits the possibility of an early miscarriage. Second, frozen cycles allow a break between the ovaries being asked to produce multiple mature egg follicles and the uterus creating the perfect fluffy nest of endometrium for one healthy embryo to mature. Lastly, you may have multiple embryos ready to use, so if your first embryo transfer does not work, you’ll have another embryo ready to try again. And if it does work, you’ll be ready to implant when it is time for baby two or three.

At Overlake Reproductive Health we are proud to introduce the Peace of Mind^® Program for IVF patients – the first and only program in the Pacific Northwest to offer a 100% refund guarantee for cycles using your own eggs as well as donor eggs – to give you the freedom to undergo the effective fertility treatment you need without financial uncertainty. We are so confident our IVF treatments will work, we’re one of the only clinics to offer this.

How Does the Peace of Mind 100% Refund Program Work?

The Peace of Mind 100% Refund Program is for cash pay patients – meaning we do not run it through insurance (most patients do not have fertility insurance anyway).

For couples who qualify medically, we offer up to four egg retrieval cycles with your own eggs or donor eggs, and as many embryo implantations as needed, for a fixed discounted fee. For a safe and healthy pregnancy, we will only implant one embryo at a time. If using your own eggs, all egg retrieval cycles must be completed before age 38. If using Donor Egg, all cycles must be completed before age 55, with medical clearance for pregnancy if appropriate.

You can continue treatment until you achieve a “take home baby!”

If you don’t take a baby home from the hospital after all available treatment cycles, we will refund you 100% of the Program fee. That’s how confident we are in our diagnoses and treatments.

The program fee covers all treatment costs except pre-cycle diagnostic testing, surgery other than IVF procedures, fertility medications, the cost of donor sperm if needed and/or egg donor screening, and egg donor compensation. These costs not covered because they are third party costs. We do cover the first year of embryo cryo storage (from the date of the initial freeze date).

If the treatment works the first time, couples will have paid more than if they had paid for one cycle at a time. But if you don’t get pregnant, or have a miscarriage, you have the confidence to keep going. If you need two egg retrieval cycles to succeed, you will have paid less than traditional fee-for-service pricing. If it takes more than that, you will pay substantially less and more and more of your treatment will be “on us.”

Are there any exceptions to the 100% refund?

Apart from a take home baby, only two. Couples can choose to withdraw from the program at any time, for any reason, once you have used all your frozen embryos to try to get pregnant. At that time, we will be happy to refund any money remaining after the cost of your treatments has been subtracted.

Occasionally, despite careful pre-cycle testing, we will need to withdraw a couple from the program after one or more treatment cycles. This is not common, and we will give you a prorated refund based on the number of egg retrieval cycles completed.

Do you offer the Peace of Mind Program to Out-of-State Patients?

Yes, and we offer an out-of-state discount. We have successfully helped couples from Canada and many states achieve their dreams. We can often coordinate your testing and treatment with a fertility clinic closer to home, and we can help you to plan for the occasions when you do need to travel to our clinic for procedures. We have more information here for Canadian patients.

So, if you’re thinking about IVF but are concerned about incremental costs and needing multiple rounds, this may be your best option. It’s hard to know if one IVF cycle is all you’ll need, so this package offers your best chance of building a family with a set price.

Many factors go into choosing the right fertility clinic for you and your family. Cost is certainly always one of them but be aware of what’s included and not included in the price. And pay attention to the clinic’s success rates. At Overlake Reproductive Health, we stand by our live birth success rates as being among the highest in the state of Washington.

Our Peace of Mind® 100% IVF program comes with a money back guarantee to take home a live baby, or all your money back. Not every clinic is confident enough to offer that!

Plus, it is important to note that our IVF programs include everything you might need to become pregnant including assisted hatching, ICSI, Preimplantation Genetic Screening, biopsy on day 5, 6 or 7, and vitrification (freezing) and thawing of your embryos by the best embryologists in the country.

We believe if you’re going to go through the trouble and expense of IVF, you might as well get the best treatment and care available. That’s why, at our clinic, we biopsy your embryos on day 5, 6, or 7, when your embryos tell us they are ready for the most accurate results. Our flash-freeze, or vitrification process, has a 99.9% successful thaw rate. Other fertility clinics may biopsy for PGS screening on day 3, which takes less skill and gives much less accurate information. Many clinics offer PGS testing for some patients, but we strongly believe all patients going through IVF benefit from PGS screening.

When we biopsy on Day 5, 6 or 7 the embryo has matured to the blastocyst stage, and its cells have multiplied to over 100. Inside the egg’s protective shell (zona pellucida), two different types of cells serve two different purposes:

• The inner cell mass (ICM) will form the fetus.
• Trophectoderm cells become the placenta.

ORH’s skilled embryologists tap through the egg’s outer shell so that a small proportion of trophectoderm cells begin to push through the microscopic opening. They remove about 6 to 9 of these cells and send them off to a lab for genetic testing. Then all of your tested embryos are flash-frozen, or vitrified, for safekeeping until it’s time to plan the embryo transfer in a future month.

The trophectoderm biopsy performed in PGS will not harm your embryos. The cells that are removed make up the placenta, not the baby, and their removal does not affect implantation of the embryo or development.

Why do we wait a month between retrieval and implantation?

The short answer is so we have the results of your PGS test in hand and can choose the healthiest embryo. But it’s worth noting, that IVF requires over stimulating the ovaries with prescription drugs to produce multiple mature eggs at the same time. By producing multiple eggs, we hope to gain one (hopefully more) perfect egg that will fertilize successfully and go on to mature into your healthy baby. A fresh IVF cycle will farm your eggs, not test for chromosomal abnormalities and genetic defects that typically cause miscarriages, and place a fertilized egg into your uterus to implant during the same cycle.

We now know that the medicines used to make multiple eggs can impair the lining of the uterus, leading to lower success rates for fresh embryo transfer cycles. Knowing that, other clinics will often place two of more embryos at the same time hoping that one will be genetically normal and grow. Implanting multiple embryos helps increase fertility clinics’ success rates but can also result in twins or triplets. While multiples may seem like a great idea initially, they often cause complications that can be harmful or even fatal to the mother or fetuses or both. The best clinics, like Overlake Reproductive Health, perform PGS on day 5 and only transfer one embryo at a time for a safe, healthy pregnancy.

Reasons why Day 5, 6 or 7 Trophectoderm Biopsy is preferential.

• Significantly more accurate
• Less False Positives
• Less damage to the embryo

In addition to PGS, we also use a MitoScore to choose the healthiest embryo to implant. Overlake Reproductive Health has the most experienced embryologists in the country, fertility doctors, IVF lab capabilities, and advanced technologies to perform these intricate processes.

RFID Tags for Security

ORH is the first fertility clinic in the NW to add an extra layer of security through our RI Witness program which labels all patient samples with a digital ID tag that is continuously monitored throughout the process. Thanks to self-adhesive RFID tags attached to all the laboratory plasticware, it is possible to ensure only compatible samples are worked on at any one time. We implemented this secure process for total confidence. While this system is required in Europe, you’ll find very few clinics with it here in the US.

Getting it Right the First time Saves You Money

Our goal is to compete on being the best and stand behind our success rates (82% Implantation Rate and 66% Live Birth Rate). And, because we often achieve a healthy pregnancy right out of the gate, we do wind up being the least expensive option. Especially because many of our package programs offer money back with early success!

We are confident that no matter what your individual challenge with infertility is, we have the right expertise and skillset to help you have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.