EMR CEO, Sep Seyedi, responds to a recent interview with the CCRM president, regarding the network’s strategy to scale
Tracy Belsan, President of CCRM, recently joined Griffin Jones on the Inside Reproductive Health podcast to discuss her first year leading one of the country's most respected fertility networks. The conversation covered a lot of ground: patient access, financial barriers, physician recruitment, hub and spoke strategy, APPs, and — perhaps most pointedly for anyone in the EMR space — the road to consolidating CCRM's technology infrastructure in 2026 and 2027.
Tracy speaks plainly about what she's working through, and the space is better for it. I want to add a layer to the conversation, not to push back on what CCRM is doing, but to name what typically comes next for networks doing exactly this kind of work.
I pulled some of Tracy’s quotes from the episode’s transcript, and share my thoughts below each.
"We had made a pretty cumbersome process on the amount of forms that a patient had to fill out... Are we putting up an impediment to patients and their families to get into us quicker?"
Tracy's work on reducing intake burden is the kind of operational change that makes a real difference. What many networks are working through next is how to carry that progress consistently across every site as they grow. Reducing intake at one site is one move. Making sure every patient at every site experiences that same shorter intake is the layer underneath it. That layer is the platform networks are working with.
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"The number one obstacle is really the financial piece for patients. That's where we see the largest drop-off."
Tracy is right to call this out as the primary driver. What we see across networks is that progress comes when the financial side of the journey is brought closer to the rest of the patient experience. When it lives separately — in a different system, managed by a different team — both the staff and the patient end up bridging that gap manually. Improving one part of the journey can put pressure on the others if the platform underneath isn't built to move them together.
"What I don't want for our physicians is that we implement a system that becomes a burden to them. We want it to be very clinically sound."
The standard Tracy sets here is the right one. A system that requires physicians to re-enter information or manage multiple tools adds friction to the people the network most relies on. Physician time is precious. New patient visits, surgery schedules, follow-ups — there is no slack in that day. An EMR that becomes a documentation burden doesn't just frustrate physicians; it becomes a ceiling on how many patients the network can serve.
The nuance worth naming: most fertility networks today run systems that were built to do one job each, and do it well. The EMR records the chart. The scheduling tool books the slot. The billing system runs the claim. At one clinic, informal coordination fills the gaps between them. At a network with 21 sites, that coordination is distributed across dozens of teams. A physician adjusts a treatment plan after a monitoring visit. A nurse or coordinator reflects that change manually across scheduling, patient communication, and the lab. That happens for every patient, every adjustment, every cycle.
CCRM's move toward a consolidated EMR is the right call. The question worth sitting with is not just which system, but how much of that inter-system coordination the new platform can actually take on — and how consistently it can hold that across every location, not just the flagship.
"We want to let nurses be nurses... we want their job to be just taking care of that family, of that patient."
This is a goal most clinical leaders share. The harder question is how much of the coordination work can be supported by the system itself. Skilled teams handle inter-system coordination every day, and they handle it well. But as patient flow improves and the network adds locations, the volume of those coordination steps grows alongside it. At some point, the constraint shifts from operational process to platform capacity. Making it easier for patients to get into care often means the rest of the system has to move faster to keep up.
Tracy and her team appear to be doing the work that positions a network well. The operational discipline CCRM has built — standardized labs, physician onboarding at the Denver flagship, data dashboards, the CCRM way — is exactly the foundation a platform needs to be useful rather than disruptive.
What comes next is asking the platform to carry more of what the team currently holds together. Not to replace that discipline, but to make it durable across every location, at every scale. The networks that figure that out first will be the ones that can actually serve the patients Tracy is describing — the ones who need care, can access it, and don't fall out of the journey before they get there.
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