Page 10 - FSANZ Autumn 21 Volume 95 Amended

Launch of Your IVF Success website
The success rates of all IVF clinics across Australia will be available online for the first time making comparisons between clinics easier and more transparent for patients.
The Your IVF Success website, launched by the Federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt, and South Australian Senator Stirling Griff, will allow patients to search accredited IVF clinics in Australia.
It will provide independent and impartial information about the clinics and their treatment success.
Previously, the only way a patient could look at success rates was to go to the individual clinics directly where outcomes are presented in different ways, thus making comparisons difficult.
The new online tool has been developed by the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit (NPESU) at University of New South Wales in Sydney and it is funded by the Federal Government.
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Patients will also have access to a new online estimator that allows couples to predict their chances of successfully having a baby based on their individual characteristics.
Professor Georgina Chambers, Director of the NPESU, said: “Providing more transparency to patients has been possible because the NPESU manages the Australia and New Zealand Assisted Reproduction Database (ANZARD), a registry of all assisted reproductive technology treatment cycles undertaken in Australian and New Zealand fertility clinics.”
The IVF prediction tool, created by data scientists from the University of NSW Sydney (UNSWS) Centre for Big Data Research in Health, is based on information from more than 600,000 IVF cycles in Australia between 2009-2017 recorded via the ANZARD database.
ANZARD collects information on almost 80,000 IVF cycles performed by Australian fertility clinics each year. The most recent data from ANZARD shows that more than 14,500 babies are born each year in Australia from IVF treatment.
People will be able to predict their chance of IVF success by entering characteristics such as the couple’s age, infertility diagnosis, whether the couple is new to IVF, previous IVF cycles and if the patient already has children.
“IVF is a difficult process both physically and emotionally, and each cycle can leave patients significantly out of pocket,” Professor Chambers said.
“This independent site will be invaluable for anyone thinking about starting or continuing IVF and looking for impartial information to inform those choices.
“However, we do stress on the website that the information is best understood in consultation with a patient’s fertility doctor.”
The success rates of clinics are measured using four indicators including births from each egg retrieval cycle for all women and for those who are new to IVF, births per individual treatment attempt and births for each embryo that is transferred.
‘We do stress on the website that the information is best understood in consultation with a patient’s fertility doctor’
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These four measures provide an overall view of a clinic’s performance while respecting clinician and patient autonomy for how IVF is practised.
A fifth measure that reports on clinical pregnancy rates from the previous year will be introduced in 2022.
“Most importantly, these measures minimise incentives for poor clinical practice, or incentivise clinics to only treat patients with a good chance of IVF success,” Professor Chambers explained.
Senator Griff said the important project would help people navigate the often complex world of IVF.
“I want to thank the expert working party from the UNSWS, Access Australia, and the IVF Directors’ Group representing the IVF clinics for their considerable efforts to make this online tool a reality,” he added.
The Your IVF Success website is part of a $4.6 million Medical Research Future Fund grant over four years from 2019-20 to the UNSWS.
For more information, go to yourivfsuccess.com.au