In a piece I recently wrote for Fertility Ties, an on-line community of reproductive professionals who provide expert advice on all things ART, I addressed with the reader (most likely IVF patients considering collaborative reproduction for family building) information about “agencies” and the role such an entity can play in a prospective parents family formation strategy. This piece will run later this week and I am hopeful that it will allow for consumers the opportunity to make an informed decision on whether or not to work with an agency and more importantly on how to select the right agency.

Prospective Families, an agency I started almost four years ago is, I would hope, the “right agency” for many of the recipient parents who come to our site, register for and peruse the PF donor database, engage my staff in counsel on donor selection and ultimately choose to incorporate the Prospective Families team into a next effort for achieving a healthy pregnancy.

As mentioned in the Fertility Ties article, agency selection is a critical matter and patients might want to rely on their clinical team for guidance and input. But how do clinics come to know an agency and why should that relationship matter?

I am delighted to share that Prospective Families works, independently, with approximately a dozen fertility centers in the North East and several in other regions of the country. Our relationships with the donor egg programs at these clinics, while completely independent and not otherwise formally connected in any business context, is a relationship based on those clinics deeming our practices, policies, ethical standards and the quality of donor candidates to be consistent with what the clinic intends for their patients. These relationships have been cultivated over many years, some began even before I launched Prospective Families and, because the relationships allow for honest and regular exchange about best practices, it is a relationship that can yield for the patient agency engagement that minimizes consumer risks.

We work with small programs, large institutional programs and programs with in-house donor pools who want to offer their patients an option for donor selection after the in-house candidates have been deemed, either by the program or the patient, as insufficient. NYU, Cornell, East Coast Fertility on Long Island, The Bay State Medical Center in Western Massachusetts are all programs which primarily “match” their patients in-house but look to Prospective Families when a patient needs a donor with unique characteristics not otherwise available through the clinical program. It is my pleasure to support these otherwise “full-service” programs and am grateful that these institutional practices have confidence in what Prospective Families can offer their patients should the need arise.

Prospective Families is pleased and delighted to also work with Massachusetts General Hospital, The Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Women and Infant’s Hospital and several other larger programs while remaining as committed to and active with the donor egg programs at smaller centers like Boston IVF, RMA NY, IVF NJ, Cardone Reproductive Medical, Batzofin Fertility, Reproductive Science Center as well as Columbia Fertility Centers in the D.C. area. We are on the “preferred agency” list at these centers because of the relationships we have built not only with the physicians who oversee the donor egg programs but also the nurses, coordinators and mental health providers who round-out the clinical donor egg team.

Because we are independent agency, with no formal or contractual relationship with any one clinical program, our client base is diverse, our donor pool is equally as diverse, my staff sees to it that we are current on the varied protocols at each of the centers we work with, and Prospective Families, it seems, therefore, is generally regarded as the right fit for patients cycling at what are the nation’s top third-party family building programs. We return the confidence that clinics have in Prospective Families with focus and commitment to any patient coming from any of these wonderful centers. (And we love it when programs feel so strongly about Prospective Families that they not only send to us their patients but sometimes they refer prospective donor candidates….it is so nice to be so well thought of!)