A new partnership between CoxHealth and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will make things easier for women with infertility issues. KSMU’s Michele Skalicky has more.
The new partnership is expected to reduce travel expenses and the amount of time away from work for women seeking treatment for infertility.
Dr. Staci Niemoth, medical director of Women’s Services at CoxHealth, said before this program, women would have their initial infertility work up done through their primary OB/GYN. Once they got to a certain point in their evaluation or needed to move on for treatment, they would have been referred outside the system.
"To either Kansas City, St. Louis or Columbia. Now, through this partnership with Washington University Department of Reproductive Endocrinology, we are able to coordinate that treatment or further evaluation to be done in a combination between St. Louis and here at Cox," she said.
Procedures, like invitro fertilization, will still be done in St. Louis, she said, but monitoring can now be done locally.
Women meet virtually with Washington University’s medical team of reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialists through a telemedicine clinic housed at the Turner Center.
According to Niemoth, in general women are waiting longer to have babies, and that results in increased infertility rates. She said "that factor makes this type of service more crucial than it's ever been before."
