Breaking bad habits

Set industry standards and revitalize your business.

Author's name: Freik Vermeulen

A few years ago in London, I met a doctor who worked at an IVF clinic. After telling me about his field and the nature of the industry in the UK, he immediately and enthusiastically began discussing what he and others in his field refer to as the "Competitors Table." This is a government-mandated website, accessible to the public, containing information on all IVF clinics in the UK, compiled and published annually by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. Because the site contains information about each clinic's success rate, people began to treat it as a ranking site. The site was a brilliant attempt to increase transparency and influence consumer behavior. Since most clinics in the UK are private (although there are a fair number of National Health Service clinics as well), and since the procedure is expensive, the idea was to enable patients to go online, study the information, and make better choices about their medical care. Even better, the success rates quoted were based on objective data. In many companies, you can discuss whether something has been a "success," a "partial failure," etc., but not in IVF. The percentage of births resulting from the treatment is clear: either the patient gets pregnant or she doesn't. Therefore, the Table of Champions website was intended to be beneficial to both patients and clinics. The best clinics are rewarded for their high success rates, and patients are empowered to seek out the best practitioners. But there was a problem that well-intentioned politicians overlooked. A clinic's success rate isn't just determined by its skill at performing IVF; it's also influenced by the quality of the data—the women who walk through the doors. Physiologically, some women are more receptive to IVF treatment than others, and so a clinic's success rate depends largely on the age, health, and fertility of the women it accepts as clients. For example, a clinic that only accepts fertile women in their early twenties who have never undergone IVF treatment and have abundant eggs that can be "continuously harvested" (as they say in the field) will have a high success rate. A clinic that also treats women in their forties who have previously tried IVF treatments without success and only have a few eggs left in the freezer from previous treatments will likely have lower success rates.