Monitor only patient for IVF

I have had good experiences at Spring fertility based here in the bay… Oakland, SF, Danville, there are many clinics, some which just do monitoring and some that see you for the actual procedures. I am not sure if they do monitoring only but it would be worth asking! They’re always pleasant when I talk to them and helpful, so I hope they’d be a good fit! Right now I’m seeing Dr. Fisher and he is great. Good luck! Their number is 415-964-5618 

I was in a similar situation when I was a surrogate (x2) several years ago. I lived in the Bay Area but my IVF doctor was in LA. I did make several day trips to LA for appointments, but was able to save myself some travel by being a monitor-only patient at Pacific Fertility Center the first time around, and at Laurel Fertility Care the second. I'm not sure if they are still offering that as an option, but if not, maybe they can offer some other recommendations. Good luck!

I am unfortunately familiar with this problem. You have limited options. For bloodwork, most labs can do it — my clinic works with Labcorp, and they were fine but won’t do same day fertility labs on weekends. For a transfer, not as much of an issue usually. 
 

For ultrasound, you have four options I know of. 1) The cheapest is Scanbabies…. But it’s in Los Gatos. They get a lot of fertility monitoring patients.  2) Aimee Eyvazzadeh’s office will do it Monday-Friday (and sometimes they can squeeze you in on weekends.) This is where I went. It’s in San Ramon which is a hassle but not as bad as Los Gatos. 3) El Cerrito Ultrasound (I think that’s the name?) claims to do it but I don’t know anyone who’s gone. I think they’re pretty new. 4) there’s a diagnostic imaging place in Elk Grove. 
 

Good luck! For the bloodwork, my out of town clinic was very helpful in coordinating. You might ask your clinic if there’s a lab they like. 

I did local monitoring at UCSF for IVF with a Southern California clinic. UCSF was great. They do monitoring only for a lot of patients and they were very organized. There were never issues with them sending my results to my clinic promptly. The services were at the Mission Bay campus early in the morning so the commute to SF wasn’t too bad. Good luck with your transfer!

1st—commiseration and support. My health insurance is with Kaiser but my IVF is not, and Kaiser has been (for the last 3 years!) continually resistant to any requests (labs, ultrasounds) not ordered by their drs (and while I see their point on occasion, most of this seems to be institutional petulance!). My suggestion Re: Kaiser is to “advocate” (fight, niggle, annoy!) until you get some of the things that really do seem reasonable for them to fulfill as your healthcare team (this has worked in most circumstances for me). 

2–For IVF, I work with UCSF and have loved them from the start. I also consulted with Spring Fertility but ultimately went with UCSF. 
 

Best of luck+power to you! 

Thank you all. OP here, I have an update, in case anyone goes through anything similar in this period:

• UCSF does take outside monitoring patients. However, they are VERY expensive, for the pre-work (saline sono) that I needed. I decided in the end to not go with them. But they are very professional and have a well-oiled process in place. Just be sure to ask about costs, if this is an issue for you.
• Dr. Aimee in San Ramon - I ended up going with them because they were also very easy to work with and were more reasonably priced, though a bit far from me because they are in San Ramon.
• Reproductive Medicine Associates (SF) - They do some outside monitoring (standard u/s and bloodwork), but they could not do the saline sono. However, I found them also very reasonable in terms of price.
• Other clinics that came recommended to me but basically shut down their outside monitoring services after COVID happened were Spring Fertility, Pacific Fertility, and RSC.

Hope that is helpful to anyone, and thank you for the well wishes!

We were in a similar situation with our embryos in Chicago, but ended up using Cryostork to move them out here so we could do everything all together at one clinic. With the monitoring, it was a pain to try to get the doctors to work together, didn't account for any complications and for basically the same cost of travel we were able to move the embryos. We ended up working with Dr. Morin at RMA in SF and had a great experience! We still laugh about how our baby was the only member of the family who got to travel in 2020. 

I see your update on the saline sono -- I was able to get Kaiser to cover a hysteroscopy by asking my RE for it as a non-fertility thing.  Message me if you'd like more details about the appropriate language to use.  

How friendly are you with your OB at Kaiser?  I went through 3 long years of fertility treatment at UCSF and my Kaiser OB (who I love) helped me in as many ways as she could.  I even ended up having an expensive fibroid surgery at Kaiser because UCSF said I needed it, and my doc helped make it happen.  They performed the D&C when I miscarried. Then she delivered my son.  I'm sure there was a lot of luck at play in this, but I'd start by including your OB on your plans and seeing if they'll support you.  Don't call member services - they will definitely say no.