OPINION

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BY AJAY SINGH

This essay offers a perspective shaped by years spent working alongside fertility practices as they navigate emotionally complex, high-stakes IVF journeys.

Ajay Singh is the Chief Strategy Officer at Quality Reviews, a digital health company focused on patient relationship management and real-time engagement for complex, high-touch care environments. He works closely with fertility practices, health systems, and care teams to help them better understand patient experience, build trust across long care journeys, and operationalize engagement without increasing staff burden.

With a background spanning health systems, healthcare SaaS, and AI-driven patient feedback and engagement platforms, Ajay’s work sits at the intersection of technology, trust, and care delivery. That work has shaped how he views IVF today—and why he believes trust is being underestimated.

“In IVF, outcomes matter—but trust decides who stays, who leaves, and who refers.”

Trust in IVF Is Built Between Appointments, Not Visits

I’ve worked alongside fertility teams long enough to know that most practices are not struggling with empathy. They are struggling with scale. IVF asks patients to live with uncertainty — medically, emotionally, and financially — over extended periods of time. Even when care is excellent, outcomes remain probabilistic, failure is common, and explanations are often incomplete. In that environment, trust is not episodic. It accumulates, erodes, and gets tested repeatedly, often between visits rather than during them.

For IVF patients, trust is shaped by what happens when no one is in the room: how quickly questions are answered, how silence is interpreted, whether communication feels anticipatory or reactive, and whether setbacks are met with clarity or confusion. Delays, inconsistency, or fragmented messaging may feel operational to clinics, but they land personally for patients whose emotional and financial stakes are already high.

The challenge is structural. Human-only models do not scale trust. Nurses, coordinators, and physicians cannot consistently check in at every emotional inflection point across hundreds or thousands of active patients. They cannot tailor communication based on prior outcomes, coping styles, or cumulative stress without support. And they cannot reliably identify early signals of disengagement before patients quietly withdraw.

In IVF, outcomes matter—but trust decides who stays, who leaves, and who refers.

Trust Is Built Between Appointments. Are You Managing It—or Losing It?

IVF patients don’t expect certainty. They expect clarity, presence, and consistency—especially when no one is in the room. Q Reviews helps clinics turn trust from a fragile “soft skill” into reliable infrastructure.

In a short strategy session, you’ll see how Q Reviews helps you:

• Detect trust erosion before patients disengage
• Respond faster when silence creates doubt
• Create consistent, anticipatory communication at scale
• Strengthen confidence across long, uncertain care journeys
• Protect reputation, retention, and long-term growth

Schedule Your Strategy Session — see exactly where trust is leaking and how to fix it fast.

Contact Q Reviews Today

Why Traditional Systems Fail to Support Trust

The system's practices rely on compounding this problem. EHRs document care, enable billing, and ensure compliance — all essential functions. What they don’t do is manage relationships. They don’t track confidence, uncertainty, or how trust recovers after failure. Generic CRMs misunderstand IVF in a different way, reducing patients to leads or transactions when the reality is long-term decision-making under emotional strain.

This gap is where IVF-specific Patient Relationship Management (PRM) becomes necessary. A purpose-built PRM platform is not designed to replace human connection. It is designed to protect it. It enables longitudinal understanding of where patients are emotionally, not just clinically. It supports proactive outreach after moments that strain trust — cycle cancellations, failed transfers, medication changes, or financial conversations — rather than waiting for frustration to surface.

PRM also makes trust erosion visible before it becomes irreversible. Silence, delayed responses, missed appointments, and changes in feedback tone are often early indicators. Without structure, these signals remain scattered and subjective. With the right infrastructure, they can prompt timely, empathetic intervention.

Patient attrition is often misunderstood because it is quiet. Clinics attribute departures to cost, geography, or outcomes, but many patients leave because they no longer feel supported or understood. By the time dissatisfaction becomes explicit, trust has often been eroding for months. This has consequences well beyond retention — it shows up in staff burnout, reputational damage, and long-term brand erosion.

“A purpose-built PRM platform is not designed to replace human connection. It is designed to protect it.”

Trust Must Be Designed, Not Left to Chance

There is a persistent fear that technology undermines high-touch care in fertility. In practice, the opposite is true. When teams lack supportive infrastructure, communication becomes reactive and fragmented. Patients experience this as indifference, regardless of intent. Thoughtful PRM reduces avoidable friction, protects staff bandwidth, and preserves empathy for moments that truly require human judgment.

The work we do at Quality Reviews alongside fertility practices has reinforced a simple truth: trust cannot be scaled through goodwill alone. It must be intentionally supported. IVF patients don’t expect certainty. They expect presence, clarity, and consistency across a journey defined by uncertainty. That level of trust deserves systems built to honor it — not just people trying to carry it on their own.