The Kaiser Permanente Center For Reproductive Health

This center has outstanding doctors (Drs Shen and Akabosu are the most caring and knowledgeable doctors) but ancillary staff is either understaffed or irresponsible. I left numerous messages to ivf nurses, financial coordinator and nobody was trying to get back to me. Im paying thousands of dollars to have no phone calls returned, next ivf cycle planned several months from now at almost age of 40, after failed ivf x1?! And im getting pretty hopeless about care in this center, and will try other places, which actually care abt hi paying clients, advanced maternal age patients and i hope kaiser administration sees this message and will take measures. For those who had problems with poor responsiveness of the staff, know that you can complain to member services.

This review applies to the 2013 – 2015 time window.
IVF treatment at Kaiser is a very mixed bag.
The doctors and most of the nurses are quite excellent.
Most of the staff is top notch actually, but unfortunately it seems like there are a few staff members who are seriously hurting the efforts of the rest of the group.
I have been surprised and disappointed in the poor organization and lack of communication within Kaiser IVF dept, and as a result, with the patients.
My supposed case manager was very unprofessional, and mistakes she made actually resulted in bodily harm to me.
For the most part I think Kaiser IVF is quite good, but I would caution people who rely on them to be very proactive in their own care management and seeking out the needed information. A lot seems to slip through the cracks, so it often requires you to follow up on things and hunt down the right source of information.

This review is for Dr. Proctor. The best doctor you can ask for when you are worried that you are not getting pregnant. He gave us a hope in our first visit. And during our 2 months of medications and injections he was always there for us. He told us in our first visit that any small question about anything I can email him. I was very much lucky to have dr proctor as my doc. I had to visit ER one time due to bleeding in my early months and he apologized atleast 10 times that he is sorry that we had to go thru that. It was not his fault and he gave us the appointment without even booking very next day that everything is alrite or not. He was very caring and He always welcomed us with a big smile. I love dr proctor and if you get him during your process consider yourself very lucky.

I was an egg donor and had all 3 of my donations here, 2 with Dr. Shen and 1 with Dr. Proctor. Sharon was my surgery coordinator for all 3 donations. The 1^st time I donated they retrieved 33 eggs, 36 on my second, and over 62 on my last. All my donations started out with same doses of Menopur and Follistim. My 1^st and 3^rd donations had Lupron with the HCG trigger. I traveled at least 160 miles round trip for each appointment.
My 1^st two donations were with Dr. Shen. She’s very meticulous and I had to come in almost every day when my retrievals were near. For my 1^st donation, my husband ended up having to drive to Palo Alto to pick up the Lurpon trigger (they decided at the last moment I should have it). I got Ovarian Hyper-​Stimulation Syndrome (OHSS) on my 2^nd retrieval (it’s very important to follow the diet, up your protein, and drink tons of Gatorade). Both ladies successfully got pregnant.
My 3^rd donation and final donation was with Dr. Proctor. He’s a little more laid back (told me if I really wanted to exercise I could, as long as there wasn’t any high intensity/​impact or fitness classes I was taking — I ended up not because I couldn’t even get through 15 min of yoga). The lady I donated to, I guess had financial issues, paid everything at the last min, then didn’t even call back Walgreen for my last medication to help stop me from getting OHSS again, so I had to drive to Palo Alto 2 days after my retrieval to pick it up (& I was extremely uncomfortable — the day of the retrieval I maxed out on pain medication, IV and oral, and was still in a lot of pain). This made my husband really upset, he felt the lady I donated to didn’t care to take care of me, when I put off us having kids for another 4 months do to this last donation. And he felt since this was my last donation and everyone knew that going in, I didn’t get treated all well and had less follow up (never got a call/​email to let me know if she was successfully impregnated like the other 2 and I was told the medication was paid for when it wasn’t).
Overall, the experience was great. Everyone is really friendly and if they don’t know the answer to a question you have they find out the answer right away. For people using egg donors please remember to take care of them. OHSS had me barely being able to breathe for a week.

When I arrived at my appointment today they said I had cancelled it. The only time I spoke to anyone in their office was the day I made the appointment back in August. I took off time from work to be here and drove across the entire east bay. They refuse to do anything about it and told me to try and make a new appointment. I even showed them my appointment confirmation and they still are blaming me. I would not recommend this center.

It’s too early to write a completed review since we just started recently. So far so good. Doctor Shen is great. She is very patient, considerate and professional. The nurse team is also great.

I would not recommend this fertility center until they make major changes in their organization of the lab as well as the way the staff care for patients. Overall it seems they need systemized approaches to avoid human errors (which had an impact on my health and the risk to my embryos health). The nurse case managers were great, very warm and friendly but there were a number of mistakes on my medication calendar. Dr. Shen is a great doctor but I was disappointed there was no counseling ahead of time about genetic testing of embryos. They should hire more Drs. or take on fewer patients so they can be more organized as well as more attentive to patients needs. I often felt like cattle with 6 – 10 women waiting in the waiting room for the ultrasound monitoring all in the same time slot. I’d run as fast as I could after blood tests to make sure I could get in quickly for ultrasound to make it to work not too late that morning. For the price for IVF, which was higher than other centers in the area, I would expect a higher level of care, that is more individualized with better organization.
Update ⁸⁄₁₄: I have been working with Reproductive Science Center and have had a stellar experience. You barely have to wait for the ultrasound and blood tests for IVF, you have one case manager who meets all your needs and is extremely involved in your care. The upside of Kaiser was that Dr. Shen did all the ultrasounds, at RSC this was done by other providers like technicians. However, overall it was such a better experience than Kaiser, even given that the Dr. did not do my follow-​up ultrasounds after the first visit. I’d sacrifice that any day for less waiting as at RSC they give you an exact time for your ultrasound and blood tests so I could plan work around it. Every other clinic I talked to did genetic testing of embryos for a woman my age, even recommended it! I think the protocol should be reconsidered at Kaiser to decrease miscarriage risk for those over 35-​PGD testing is important to offer to patients and Kaiser did not discuss it as an option until I asked. Then it was already too late, according to the Dr, as they had already been frozen.

I wish I could place negative. Here’s why.
Ultrasound I pay $ 112 X 6 = 672
IUI $ 81×3 = 243
after 5 month I ask for itemized billing for this procedure its shows that on Ultarsound Patient pay $ 71.50 and $ 41.50 on IUI only WTF! Manager said they break it down to different payment but they could not provided a detail statement. I’m dealing with this problem for 5 month now and I think this place soon to be sued…

Dr Shen was my IVF doctor, she rocks! So thoughtful, compassionate and smart, she is one in a million and I was lucky to be paired with her. I did IUI and IVF, and after IVF have a beautiful 6 week old daughter now.
I would recommend Kaiser for reproductive services, but it wasn’t perfect. My case manager Nanette was horrific, I fired her and went through without much case management, which was hard, and I still had to pay the 600 dollar case management fee. I was billed for assisted hatching which wasn’t done and had to get my money refunded, I only caught it when I was looking at the embryology report and noticed it said «none» under assisted hatching. I had secondary insurance and had to do all the billing myself, whereas other people had it done for them. I was told its because I didn’t have a case manager and because their financial person quit. It was also distressing when I was a week into maybe being pregnant to be called on a Friday at lunch and told «pay now, this minute,» and I had to give my credit card info over the phone. Of course, due to no case manager and the financial office problems I never got a bill so that I could have avoided the call. I have a friend who was never billed for some of the received services, they were that screwed up. So always check your bill. Of note, I didn’t get one until after I had paid and demanded an itemized bill for my secondary insurance claim.
The medical care was top notch, excellent, outstanding. The office/​management was subpar, so I hope that gets fixed so other people have a better experience.

I feel like I could write a novel about my IVF experience, but I will try to condense.
Nobody wants to hear that assisted conception will be their only choice to have a child. Neither does anyone want to pay $ 20,000 to have a kid. Regardless, I’m really glad that we went through it at this clinic. Having Kaiser insurance, I was immediately referred here without doing any research first. I am actually really glad I didn’t put much thought into it, because I probably would not have gone through with it if I had. I didn’t research costs or live birth rates or anything like that first, which is very unlike me. I went into it thinking I wouldn’t even be doing IVF because my issues weren’t that severe. It’s nice to know now that they have the best success rates in the bay!
We had our first meeting with Dr. Proctor in January and he was very down to business. My husband and I both liked the no nonsense approach. He had all my bloodwork and told us that we could try IUI, but looking at the statistics for the procedure, it would probably be a waste of time and money. Our best option with the highest chance was IVF. That day we decided we would do it and reserved a spot in the June cycle. The cycles fill up extremely fast!
Every single person we worked with from there on was awesome. The nurse I had was Lonnie and she was responsive with answering all my questions, even the stupid ones. She was encouraging and caring and said all the right things during an extremely stressful time. All of the nurses in the surgery center were just as great. They made me feel comfortable in a really scary situation. Every nurse I encountered at Kaiser, whether it was the surgery side or the clinic, put me at ease. I actually looked forward to my appointments.
Also, the embryologists. There is a whole freezer/​lab type place hidden in the back. They were extremely helpful in explaining what the embryos were doing and how fertilization was going. They had pictures for us of the embryos and they let my nosy husband peek into their lab.
Another tidbit for those considering Kaiser. They are the only clinic to offer a program called ESet. Not everyone qualifies and we were very lucky we did. If you have a number of perfect quality embryos and have a 5 day transfer, you have the option to put in one or two embryos. If you elect to do one embryo (which we did) instead of 2 (higher chance of twins and high risk pregnancy) and god forbid your embryo doesn’t stick at anytime during the pregnancy, Kaiser will pay for up to 3 more transfers. Pretty cool!
IVF is an extremely grueling and unnatural process on the body, but we had nothing but great outcomes every step of the way. I felt extremely confident with Dr. Proctor and everything went really well.
We are currently 9 weeks pregnant after our first IVF cycle thanks to Dr. Proctor and all the staff at the clinic.