Disconnected systems and delayed updates are creating patient-visible breakdowns as clinics scale

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BY INSIDE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

Meena Mahil has watched the same moment play out more times than she can count. A patient arrives for monitoring. Bloodwork was done that morning. The portal hasn't updated. The patient asks a nurse. The nurse checks one system, then another, then calls the lab. Three minutes later, everyone has the answer they needed an hour ago.

"Patients are already carrying a lot when they walk through the door," said Mahil, VP of Operations and Strategy at Pollin Fertility. "They're making huge emotional and financial decisions. If the system around them feels confusing or slow, that adds stress they shouldn't have to carry."

The clinical picture was fine. It always is. That's the part that makes it hard to see.

A portal that hasn't updated after morning bloodwork. A medication change that still requires a phone call to confirm. A patient sending the same question to three different inboxes because the system doesn't make it obvious where to turn. These are not clinical failures. But across the fertility industry, they are increasingly what patients remember.

THE REAL CONSTRAINT IN FERTILITY CARE IS COORDINATION

IVF outcomes are improving, but disconnected workflows are slowing clinics down as complexity and patient expectations rise.

As cycles become more complex, coordination across clinical, lab, and administrative teams is becoming harder to manage, impacting how care is delivered and experienced.

Bloomic is a fertility platform that brings clinical, lab, and patient workflows into one system, so teams aren’t chasing results, updating multiple systems, or coordinating care manually.

With Bloomic, clinics can:

Align clinical, lab, and administrative workflows in one platform
Keep patients informed throughout every stage of treatment
Reduce manual coordination across teams and locations
Support growth without increasing operational strain

See how clinics are coordinating care more effectively at scale.

SCHEDULE AN OPERATIONS AUDIT

Patients Are Arriving More Informed Than Clinics Expect

A patient recently arrived at Pollin after running her fertility data through ChatGPT. It suggested one interpretation of her follicle development. Her care team saw it differently.

"We're seeing patients come in asking very detailed questions about embryo grading or their lab results," Mahil said. "That was much less common even a few years ago."

The Pollin REI walked that patient through the full clinical picture. Not because she had more time in the day, but because she was not spending half of it pulling results from three systems.

That's not a staffing story. It's an infrastructure story. And it's playing out in clinics everywhere, whether they're tracking it or not.

"Patients today expect to understand what's happening in their care," Mahil said. "They want clarity about their results, and they want answers quickly. Disconnected systems can't support that anymore."

What Closing The Patient Experience Gap Looks Like

A single fertility cycle generates dozens of handoffs. Intake to nursing. Nursing to lab. Lab to scheduling. Scheduling to billing. At most clinics, those departments run on separate systems. The embryologist enters a result. The REI coordinating the next step checks a different system, and the two won't match until someone updates them manually. The clinical picture exists. Nobody sees it in full.

Staff fill the gap the only way they can. Phone calls, sticky notes, spreadsheets running parallel to everything else. The coordination runs on people, memory, and effort that could be spent on care.

Pollin had hit the ceiling of what people and workarounds could absorb. They went looking for infrastructure that could carry the coordination instead of asking their staff to.

That search led them to Bloomic. The brief was specific: too many handoffs, too many systems, too much relying on individuals to hold the whole picture in their heads. "If parts of the process can be guided by systems," Mahil said, "it frees up time for clinicians to spend with patients."

When an REI orders a medication change following a monitoring visit, that single decision triggers a chain: it shifts the protocol, adjusts the schedule, and requires the patient to be notified and rebooked. Previously, a nurse would read the order, manually enter the prescription change, and call the patient to arrange the return visit.

Now, that chain carries forward automatically. The patient receives a notification before anyone picks up the phone. The REI walks into the next visit with everything current.

Lab and nursing teams work from the same system. A result entered by an embryologist is immediately visible to the REI coordinating the next step. No reconciliation. No lag.

On the patient side, the same system supports visibility throughout the cycle. Patients track follicle growth during stimulation, access medication guidance, and message their care team directly. Those conversations are documented, allowing patients to revisit them instead of reconstructing a phone call from memory.

The first site proved the model. The second tested it.

What Breaks When A Clinic Scale

Mahil describes the clinic as an orchestra. "Every person has a role, and the patient only hears the music if everyone knows when they're supposed to come in."

When a clinic runs from a single site, strong people compensate for weak systems. At two, the workarounds fail. At three, patients feel it. The nurse who kept the schedule in her head leaves and the schedule goes with her. The intake process that worked at forty cycles collapses at eighty.

This is where scale punishes disconnected systems most. Not at the margins. At the core.

"Growth should never come at the cost of clarity or coordination in care," Mahil said. When Pollin opened its second location, the coordination model held because Bloomic carried the workflows from one site to the next. The nurse's institutional knowledge didn't walk out the door with her. It stayed in the platform. The patient experience stayed consistent.

The gap is not clinical. The clinics that close it will keep patients and keep growing. The rest will keep wondering why great medicine is not enough.