Most components of in-vitro fertilization aren’t covered by healthcare insurance, private or public.
But you knew that. You’re a reproductive endocrinologist, or you work for one, and you’re familiar with the challenges some patients experience raising the $12,000 to $17,000 they need for a single IVF cycle and much more for prescriptions. You know equally well that, choices for patients lacking significant personal savings (or friends and family that do) are limited to charities like Gift of Parenthood, specialist third-party lenders like Eggfund and Future Family, outsourced point-of-sale vendors like Lending USA and Ally Lending, or one of the few traditional banks that might contemplate IVF financing.
But what if you did it yourself? What if you were to fund IVF procedures in-house with all the risk-management safeguards of a name-brand lender (and more), and all the functionality and ease-of-use of an advanced financial-technology platform?
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Your peers are catching on: in-house IVF financing is the way to go
In fact, these lures are already attracting IVF specialists, whether they’re looking to personalize patient service at an established practice or working to build a new practice using the best technology available for making loans and managing installments.
The global fertility services market is expected to grow from $16.948 billion in 2020 to $18.475 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 9%, according to Research and Markets. The market is expected to reach $28.236 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 11%.
Your peers are learning that leading-edge financing technology does four things to make in-house fertility financing not just an option, but, just maybe, the way to go. They’re turning to tech-fueled in-house lending to capture a number of advantages, including:
- No-friction integration of lending software and existing system applications like those used for billing, practice management, and patient-relationship management. It’s hard to exaggerate the power of being able to run multiple interconnected systems without fear of outages and other snafus
- Low-risk credit decisions via artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can also leverage alternative criteria to give you more complete financial profiles of applicants
- Customizable financing terms to reflect an individual patient’s creditworthiness, provide incentives, or outflank third-party lenders and their term-limited “no interest” offers
- Cloud storage that streamlines operations, frees up space and ensures recoverability for compliance and analytics
Further, IVF practices that offer in-house fertility financing can see a 120% order growth after implementing in-house financing, and a 17% boost in sales. After all, 93% of US medical patients use consumer credit facilities at one point or another.
“With benefits like these stemming from fairly recent innovations, it makes less sense than ever to refer patients out for funding,” according to Dmitry Voronenko, CEO and co-founder of TurnKety Lender, a white-label lending-technology provider that supports businesses in more than 50 markets worldwide. “But a financing system that can integrate with a practice’s existing technology infrastructure is a must because it removes the burden of data storage and disaster recovery from the practice, and if it makes customization easier.”
Still, some medical practitioners fear that offering fertility-treatment loans in-house can mark a practice as “down market.” In fact, well-to-do patients like to have credit as an options=, with 60% of US high-wealth families using credit cards “regularly” ( versus 70% of the general population), according to Creditcards.com. Whether they’re incentivized by convenience, cash-back offers, travel points, or fraud protection, sophisticated patients tend to take a strategic view of credit. You can expect them to view IVF expenses in a similar light: they may not need credit, but they may well prefer it for any number of reasons.
Counting even more ways: a dynamic approach to IVF funding
“Well-off infertility patients may not need IVF financing the way some of us would,” says Voronenko. “But they expect to see it on the menu because it gives them the freedom to deploy funds as they see fit, often in keeping with household budgeting criteria that make monthly installments preferable to upfront cash payments in full.”
And making sure lending is available makes even more sense for reproductive endocrinologists. As with plastic surgery, treatment in your specialization is considered a “big ticket” medical expenditure. In fact, 15% of all big-ticket medical procedures are already financed.
For specialists, in-house financing isn’t just good customer service. It also facilitates a dynamic approach to financing that can enhance your practice. Among the benefits, these six stand out.
1. Performance
We’ve seen, in industry studies and our own experience, that our software can help can boost in-house lending portfolio’s performance across the board” — from decreasing bad debt by as much as 35%, trimming decision times by 15% to 30%, boosting profits on financing arrangements by as much as 40%, and increasing the lifetime “value of some patient relationships by 25%” — says TurnKey Lender’s Voronenko
2. Control
For an in-house lending program, you set the terms and fees you prefer in a white-label environment with no need to share fees revenue with anybody but, alas, the taxman
3. Ease
You don’t need prior experience in financial service. A great vendor for healthcare practices will make you an “expert” at the pull of a switch by providing training, intuitive interfaces, and procedural options in plain view while reducing repetitive and error-prone tasks), and providing unambiguous messaging for turnkey loan management and communications. And it’s all backed by client-centric support 24/7. As for your patients, they can use a secure smartphone app to check their balances, update payment methods, and upload relevant documents
4. Intelligence
IVF practices should hold out for an in-house lending platform with AI that harnesses the power of deep neural networks and self-learning scoring models to evaluate borrowers in real-time and make confident credit decisions in seconds rather than days. A platform suited to a busy medical practice should be flexible enough to take stock of alternative inputs beyond the usual application forms and credit-bureau scores, and shine a spotlight on aspects of personal financial behavior around spending debt-repayment habits
5. Modularity
A financing-software vendor should provide a checklist of functionalities to match the specific needs of your IVF practice. If all you want from your financing software are capabilities around origination, you can have that. The same goes for any aspect of financing, whether it’s servicing, collections, communications — any distinct functionality you choose. That way, you save money out of the gate, and you can always add functionality later
6. Security
As an IVF practitioner, you need in-house financing software from an established fintech dedicated to protecting the security of your patients and their data. The company’s information security policies should not just meet but exceed regulatory requirements and best practices. For example, TurnKey Lender has SOC 2 Type I and SOC 2 Type II compliance reports and the globally-recognized ISO 27001 Certification.
“According to healthcare entrepreneurs I’ve met with, outsourcing treatment financing has three regrettable outcomes,” says Voronenko. “The first is lack of control — not getting to set rates and other terms and having to split fees with outsiders — the second is losing opportunities for patient outreach in financing-related communications, and the third is uncertainty around security and confidentiality.”
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Providing an alternative to these outcomes is “why we created end-to-end financing automation that can be tailored to the needs of IVF practices by empowering patients to finance the care that they need without compromise,” adds Voronenko. “ Instead of patients having to pay upfront, they can make flexible payments over time, and get the treatment they need without delay.”
