People Are Sick Of The Same Old Problems. Now New Challengers Begin To Crowd Out Old Players
Fertility providers operate inside a fragmented digital landscape where patient data, workflow information, and business intelligence rarely live in the same system. In his conversation with Inside Reproductive Health, Dr. Eduardo Hariton describes this reality plainly: patients often arrive “with no data at all,” forcing clinicians to manually reconstruct histories from PDFs, scanned documents, or multi-hundred-page file transfers. Even when stored in the EMR, these documents remain unstructured and inaccessible without significant human labor. As he notes, the problem is not the upload—it’s whether the information reaches “the right space in the EMR” in a format that actually supports care.
This lack of structured data represents a clinical problem, an operational problem, and a business problem all at once. Clinics have no unified way to track where each patient is in the workup, whether critical labs have been completed, or what explains variation in conversion rates between physicians. As Dr. Hariton explains, most practices rely on a marketing CRM for lead intake, but “not a ton of CRMs at the clinical level” exist to answer foundational questions like: Has the patient completed their evaluation? Where are they stuck? Have they converted? Traditional EMRs were never built for this.
Current Reliance on EMRs Hurts The Patient Experience
The consequences of these gaps are increasingly visible at the patient level. Many fertility patients report feeling overwhelmed by fragmented instructions, unclear next steps, and inconsistent communication across care teams—factors that can lead to delayed workups or abandoned treatment plans.
“Communication will be central to the next wave of innovation with one trusted voice guiding care across teams,” Dr. Tom Hannam, founding partner of Hannam Fertility in Toronto, and CEO of Venna Health, told IRH. Venna Health supports coordinated, personalized communication across care teams, helping clinics maintain a single voice throughout the fertility journey while extending the reach of nurses and advanced practice providers
These gaps are driving a category-wide evolution. EMRs must now operate as the digital operating system of the fertility clinic—and ultimately as a clinical CRM that integrates structured patient data, workup status, outcomes, and predictive insights across the full treatment arc.
Unstructured Records Slow IVF Workups as Clinics Race Toward Interoperable Systems
The push toward structured, actionable data is central to solving the bottlenecks Dr. Hariton identifies. He describes a world where clinics historically relied on massive Excel sheets—“60 columns you care about” and endless pivot tables—to synthesize insights across systems. Modern approaches, including AI-driven data standardization, replace those sheets with automated “highways” for routing each data type to the correct field every time. Without structured ingestion, clinics cannot scale, cannot reduce dropout, and cannot understand the real drivers of IVF conversion.
This evolution is visible across the category. MedITEX, one of Europe’s leading fertility technology providers, has built its platform around interoperability and centralized intelligence. Its IVF workflow tools operate across 500+ facilities in more than 50 countries, strengthening data continuity and standardization. The company’s lineage under the NEXUS Group gained even greater clinical reach after NEXUS expanded its reproductive medicine portfolio, integrating prenatal diagnostics and reproductive workflows under one umbrella. NEXUS / ASTRAIA alone supports more than 2,400 clinics in 70+ countries, underscoring the need for operations software that unify entire reproductive-life-cycle datasets.
MedITEX’s own clinical impact is evident in increasing efficiency, reducing paperwork, and minimizing disruptions for both staff and patients. The platform centralizes patient data, automates routine documentation, and ensures real-time access to clinical information. Its emphasis on error reduction and structured records remove manual burden from physicians, nurses, and administrative teams.
AI Becomes the New Clinical Assistant as EMRs Absorb Imaging, Lab, and Workflow Systems
As the category moves from data repositories to intelligence systems, AI is shaping the next layer of capability. Artisan Medical Solutions, through its partnership with Cycle Clarity, is using real-time imaging, automated data transfer, and predictive modeling to bridge the gap between clinical decision-making and EMR documentation. Their announcement positions the integration as enabling “smarter decision-making, faster answers for patients, and more freedom for providers,” while eliminating manual data entry between systems.
The partnership reflects the broader momentum toward EMRs that act as active participants in the clinical workflow—not passive storage platforms. Automated data flow enables models to train on real-world inputs without transcription delays, while clinics benefit from reduced administrative load and improved patient communication.
Artisan’s ecosystem is also expanding through direct industry engagement and diagnostics integration. NOVA Genomics’ highlight of Artisan’s PGT Portal, emphasizing streamlined data, communication, and test management, reinforces that clinical operations and laboratory workflows must be unified under the same digital infrastructure. And at the ASPIRE IVF Congress in Singapore, Artisan’s joint exhibition with XiltriX International highlighted the importance of integrating EMRs with continuous lab monitoring systems and automation tools—an essential step toward reducing variability and enhancing lab-to-clinic data fidelity.
Together, these developments emphasize how EMR platforms, lab automation systems, diagnostic portals, and AI engines are converging to form a coordinated clinical infrastructure capable of matching patient demand with operational capacity.
New Challenger to EngagedMD, Berry Fertility Picks Up Steam
For nearly ten years, EngagedMD had been the field’s only specialized tool for patient education. Now new players have entered the marketplace, offering additional value propositions. Berry Fertility recently unveiled its all-in-one platform designed to transform the patient intake and care process for fertility clinics. The company's Smart Intake solution automates key administrative tasks, such as collecting consent forms, medical surveys, and essential documents, drastically speeding up the onboarding process for patients. This new platform also includes educational modules, allowing patients to better understand their treatment options while completing required forms. Additionally, patients are now able to self-schedule appointments, receive tailored reminders, and complete a variety of tasks based on their individual needs, making the entire journey more personalized and streamlined
The platform’s integration of AI technology not only accelerates clinic workflows but also provides deeper insights through advanced analytics. Fertility clinics can now track where patients might be getting stuck in the process, which parts of the journey take the most time, and how tasks are progressing. By offering a more comprehensive approach to task automation and patient engagement, Berry Fertility's platform challenges other solutions that primarily focus on education and consent.
Some EMRs Evolve. Some Don’t
Across the entire category, the direction is unmistakable. Fertility practices increasingly require:
Structured, unified, continuously flowing data
Interoperability across lab, imaging, genetic testing, scheduling, and financial systems
Real-time operational visibility that resembles a CRM, not a passive EMR
AI-driven predictive tools that reduce manual load and support clinical quality
This mirrors Dr. Hariton’s central message: clinics must adopt technology that allows them to “serve more patients with less people” without sacrificing patient experience. Some operational software like Berry Fertility, Venna Health and MEDITEX, and some EMRs like Artisan, are helping the field to overcome its bottlenecks—data fragmentation, manual record handling, incomplete visibility. Other such tech solutions have yet to evolve, and thus the cost, accessibility, and scalability of IVF may be slow to shift
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