In the short film, “Seeds of Hope,” which describes the philosophy of Shady Grove Fertility through the eyes of staff and patients, it’s nearly impossible to separate the emotion from the medical aspects of fertility treatment. Part of the reason for this moving portrayal of a clinical process is discussed in the film — all levels of staff at Shady Grove Fertility are consistently committed to staying in touch with what their patients are going through in the infertility struggle.
Many, like Marketing Director Patty Stull, have a personal story of their own to tell.
In telling her own story, the theme of passionate commitment to patient care weaves in and out through both her personal journey to have children and her professional endeavors to inform others who long for the same.
“What attracted me to Shady Grove,” Patty remembers, “was their transparency. They published their statistics back in 1992, before it was mandatory, when they only had a few cycles to report. They were the only clinic in the Washington DC area to do so.”
As a marketing professional, Patty found the clinic’s level of willingness to reveal their success rates very interesting. “From the beginning, this was at the core of the practice, being open and
honest about their treatment results. From a financial perspective, they knew that affording treatment was a huge problem for many prospective patients, back when managed care was new to most of the country and very confusing. Shady Grove put financial coordinators in place early on to help explain benefits and help patients understand clearly about their treatment costs so there would no billing surprises later on.”
The bottom line for Shady Grove Fertility’s services is to provide the clearest representation of all aspects about treatment so that patients can make informed health care decisions. That commitment to clarity in communication was attractive to the marketing professional in her late 20’s who had tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant while her OB/Gyns assured her that because of youth, time was on her side.
Trust, Treatment, and Lessons
While Shady Grove Fertility was developing its unique and innovative model of fertility practice, Patty was finding out that getting pregnant doesn’t always happen when you want. She and her husband, John, after nearly a year of trying conceived naturally and immediately miscarried. She next sought the assistance of her OB/GYN, who began a fertility assessment, instructing her to use home methods like basal body temperature charting to determine if she was ovulating.
“I trusted them to walk me through the process, let me know the appropriate time for things, and just take care of me,” Patty details. “Instead, I felt my testing was an afterthought; at one point they did an endometrial biopsy and it wound up being done at the wrong time. They asked me to go through it again.” Frustrated, she decided to seek out a fertility specialist. Like a lot of people before the wide expansion of the Internet, her search was rather limited. “I went to the practice that had the best, glossiest brochure.” The brochure was the only response Patty received from a number of clinics she’d called for guidance.
“Come to find out, after doing a semen analysis — for the first time — on my husband, we had male factor infertility this whole time,” Patty says incredulously.
The specialist recommended that the couple proceed to treatment with fertility medications and intrauterine inseminations (IUI), all paid for out of pocket. At that time, in the early 90’s, their treatment cycles cost around $4,000 each. Bills kept coming in that Patty wasn’t expecting, and there was no one at the clinic who explained either her insurance benefits or what to expect financially. She also never saw a physician following their initial consultation, as nursing staff
performed all the clinical duties.
This step in Patty’s fertility treatment journey didn’t result in a pregnancy, but taught her a lot about the communication of the diagnostic and treatment process, something that continues to drive her professional choices today.
After three IUI’s without success, the fertility specialist finally recommended Patty and John try IVF. That clinic’s quoted a success rate that was pretty low. The cost would be $10,000 out of pocket since the couple had no insurance benefits for treatment. “We decided we had no options but to stop treatment. We didn’t have that kind of money to gamble on such a low chance of pregnancy,” she recalls.
While the couple was trying to figure out whether or not and how to move forward to having a baby, Patty acquired a new job with one of the major pharmaceutical manufacturers who sold, of all things, fertility medications. It was a wonderful opportunity, she feels, to combine her personal experience with her profession. Her job was all about creating knowledge and referral networks between OB/GYN’s and fertility specialists. And her new company paid 100 percent of her fertility treatment.
As Patty learned more about the fertility specialists in her territory, the busy networking representative became very impressed with the fresh, eager attitudes of two young physicians, Dr. Art Sagoskin and Dr. Michael Levy, who had recently started a new IVF program, Shady Grove Fertility Centers, in Rockville, Maryland. Patty found that these fertility specialists share her enthusiasm for educating. Together they created a new reproductive education system to address the disconnects between the traditional purveyors of women’s medicine (OB/GYNs) and the cutting edge technology offered by specialty practitioners.
Around the same time, Patty was introduced to the statistics being gathered and published by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART). What she learned — that the clinic she’d been using for personal fertility treatment had success rates that were one-third of the national average — prompted her and her husband to seek reproductive assistance elsewhere. “This was a defining moment for me,” Patty remembers. “I was stunned to realize that there was a significant difference in success rates between the clinic I was at and the national average, yet the cost of treatment was the same everywhere. I made it my mission to share that information with as many people as I could, as often as I could.”
Communication, Comfort, and Success
As all of this was playing out in her career, Patty gave serious thought to putting aside usual concerns about moving from a professional relationship with Shady Grove Fertility’s physicians to the role of a patient. The conviction that Sagoskin and Levy demonstrated for their work and the clinic’s good success rates won her over in the end.
“I’d already had a professional relationship with Michael Levy, but when he sat down with my husband and me, he was a doctor with us,” Patty relates in describing their first patient consultation. “I was impressed with how he didn’t wear a lab coat, sat with us at a round table so we didn’t feel a big separation, asked to be called by first name.”
The small details of the doctor’s interaction style assured Patty that she could put her trust and faith in him. Dr. Levy encouraged the couple to try IVF, believing they had a good chance of success despite a severe male factor. The third IVF cycle resulted in John and Patty’s now 13-year old son, Taylor who was born in 1994, nearly five years after initially seeking treatment. Their second child, Abbey was born in 1996 after only one cycle of IVF.
Patty understands on a personal level what infertility patients are dealing with in order to conceive. “Going through IVF treatment is emotionally draining. You have to go into the office frequently, receive multiple injections, and every day you are on pins and needles as you wait for doctors or nurses to call you with instruction or results.” The staff at Shady Grove Fertility made it more bearable, she says, “because of the way they communicated. I trusted them completely. I always felt they had our best interest at heart.”
Soon after, Patty was invited to become an employee of the clinic that had finally helped her conceive and have a child. At the time, Shady Grove Fertility had one location with a weekly satellite in Virginia. While their goal was to expand, no one had any idea how successful their program would be.
Patty feels that their success is ultimately about the fact that the entire staff consciously focuses on the whole patient: their medical, financial, and psychological needs. “It’s just a quality practice who focuses on the details,” the marketing pro in her says, “and quality usually rises to the top.”
From the pre-Internet days of Shady Grove Fertility Center’s efforts to educate OB/Gyns on the need for expedient patient referrals to Shady Grove Fertility’s leadership in offering medically sound consumer information on the Web, Patty Stull has always felt emotionally motivated about sending out the messages that she learned as an infertility patient.
“I knew what I went through and for how many years. In the process, I learned things that, if I had known them before, I could’ve walked down that road much faster,” she reflects with hindsight.
There are so many aspects of the practice at Shady Grove Fertility that Patty wants to share with the public. An important part of her position as Marketing Director is to keep people informed about the ever-changing landscape of treatment technology and to monitor and report on the patient’s experience as they progress through their care in the practice. “To stay true to our core philosophy, we have to continually ask – are we delivering not just the best success rates but also the personalized care that means so much, and is just as important.”
She’s personally familiar with how much more empowered today’s patient is than in the past, believing there is an evolution underway that moves patients more and more toward becoming their own advocates.
“I think the advent of managed care actually trained patients to believe they could change doctors.” That change in thinking by health care consumers and the expansion of quality information on the Internet might be why fully half of Shady Grove Fertility patients are self-referred.
“If I hadn’t taken my care into my own hands, it’s sobering to think of where I might be today. Would we have had our full family? How different our lives would be today had we made different choices! This continues to inspire me to let patients know about their options.”
The former patient and, now, mother of three children offers consummate advice to those just learning about their infertility. “Understand when to seek treatment. Be sure your plan is moving along appropriately, especially if you are older. If you think you need to move on to a fertility specialist, do it, but do your homework first. Find out which Center is most appropriate for your needs. Most of all, take action.”
