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Why Self-Insured Employers Care About IVF Outcomes · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:08
  David Williams: So I know that employers are interested in outcomes and cost transparency, and those are general sort of terms, but what does it mean in your space?
• 0:17
  David Williams: You started off, I think, with some talking about like implementation rate, and there-- I'm sure there's a number of other key, uh, metrics.
• 0:24
  David Williams: But how, how are you being held accountable these days?
• 0:27
  David Stern: We have service level agreements, and we put into our contracts a certain amount of… For example, you used the example of multiple births.
• 0:35
  David Stern: Just to give you a couple figures, a triplet in the United States is about five hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars.
• 0:41
  David Stern: A twin is a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars.
• 0:43
  David Stern: That actually data is probably ten years old, so it's probably grown even more.
• 0:47
  David Stern: If you're a self-insured employer, that cost is hitting your bottom line.
• 0:52
  David Stern: And so we have in our contracts a multiple birth rate that says we will guarantee below a certain percentage, usually five percent or below.
• 1:01
  David Stern: We have miscarriage, uh, rates where we have lower miscarriages because we're putting back tested embryos, so there's a lower risk of miscarriage.
• 1:10
  David Stern: We look at, uh, how long does it take for a patient or an employee to get in to see a provider.
• 1:17
  David Stern: So these are ways that we offer, um, essentially, you know, skin in the game for us because if we don't hit these agreed-upon parameters, then we give discounts back to the employers.
• 1:28
  David Stern: But what they're really concerned about is the risk of the multiple birth because that can really be devastating to them as a self-insured company.
• 1:36
  David Stern: Uh, and they wanna make sure that they're having good outcomes.
• 1:39
  David Stern: And so success rates in terms of what is a live birth rate is also important to them because they don't want someone-- I-infertility is a hamster wheel.
• 1:46
  David Stern: You're going around in circles.
• 1:47
  David Stern: It can be very frustrating.
• 1:49
  David Stern: It's very emotional.
• 1:50
  David Stern: Um, you know, there's time off of work and those type of things.
• 1:53
  David Stern: So the burden, there's emotional burden.
• 1:56
  David Stern: So to make it easier for the patient, we have care coordinators.
• 1:59
  David Stern: We're actually working with artificial intelligence now to streamline the triage and to make it quicker and easier for patients to get in to see a provider and to make sure that we collect information so that they know, the provider knows why this patient is coming in, and you don't have to waste a lot of time, um, when you do that first initial visit