Platform helping patients all around the world to choose wisely
After the international renowned Global Clinic Rating (GCR) has awarded IVF Spain Alicante with the Global Clinic Rating Quality Certificate and announced us as the best fertility clinic in the world, we at IVF Spain wanted to interview Daniel C. Shaw, co-founder of GCR, to understand a bit more about the important work of his accreditation portal.
What was your motivation to create the Global Clinic Rating?
When my Grandfather suddenly lost control of his legs early in life and was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease, I was unable to find a local clinic that treated his illness. And when I did find a clinic online hundreds of miles from his home, I had no idea of the expected success rate if he had treatment in that clinic, as opposed to another clinic in another part of the country for example.
When discussing this issue with other patients facing major health conditions, I found that this problem still applies to everything from dentistry to cardiology, even in todays digital age there are no quality outcomes of medical facilities published for fair comparison. So we built the Global Clinic Rating GCR.org.
I’m proud to know that we are able to tell anyone within 60 seconds which clinics & hospitals that work with GCR perform the best in their chosen specializations. For example which dental clinic has done work that lasts the longest, which fertility clinic can give you the highest chance of having 2 male twins or which cancer hospital has proven to increase your current life expectancy after diagnosis by 10x, saving days of tiresome research online and in the end, simply guessing which clinic will give you the best results.
Could you tell us a little bit about the philosophy that moves GCR?
Even in this day of big data, where we assess destinations, hotels, restaurants, banks, insurances, cars and schools online we still have no fact-based comparison of medical clinics to based our health decisions on.
By solving this problem, we have already demonstrated that a suitable clinic is often more accessible than you think, and on the other hand – choosing the wrong clinic can mean serious physical and emotional distress, or in extreme cases – even death.
How do you select the fertility clinics that of the platform GCR.org?
First of all, it is important to mention, that any medical facility can sign in for FREE and provide the data needed. Later on, all the fertility clinics are ranked according their GCR Sco
GCR Score is generated based on the data from 4 pillars of clinic Excellence. We look at the level of Expertise, Facilities, Services and Patient Outcomes available and within each “pillar” we give the clinic a score. This means that while a clinic might score highly in the level of expertise available, if they don’t have the technology available to support high clinical level and patient outcomes – this will be reflected in the overall score.
Out of 559 fertility centres in Europe, what is special about IVF Spain so that it is ranked number 1 in your ranking?
IVF Spain achieved the status #1 fertility clinic in Europe in our latest GCR report – Europe: Top 10 Fertility clinics in 2018 because this clinic has really outstanding results in 4 pillars of clinic Excellence (Expertise, Facilities, Services and Patient Outcomes). The secret ingrediency of the clinic are great results in the field of IVF, skilled clinical team, high-quality services and state-of-the-art equipment.
How do you see the future of assisted reproduction?
With a medical issue 5 000 years ago we prayed to the Gods to help us. 2 000 years ago we started to turn to human doctors instead for suggestions and intervention. 10 years ago we started to turn to data.
If you go to a doctor today, you very often get blood tests, an MRI, an EEG, an X-Ray, genetic tests that produces data by which a doctor or more increasingly an algorithm can interpret the data. I think this is also future of assisted reproduction.
On one hand, the data will help us to decide, which clinic to choose based on clinical success metrics. On the other hand, thanks to the data collection, doctor will be able to do better diagnoses and apply more accurate treatments.
