Cost-effective infertility care

Cost-effective healthcare has become a principal paradigm in all areas of medicine. In order to establish cost-effective care, clinical outcomes under various cost conditions have to be examined. Such a process cannot be static since it has to consider ever evolving treatments and outcome results. In infertility, the evaluation of cost-effective care should be simpler than in most other areas of medicine since treatment end-points are easily defined. Nevertheless, the field is lagging in the establishment of cost-effective treatment algorithms. In this review, an effort is made to define the current state of the art of cost effective infertility care, to suggest steps that can be taken to drive the process forward and to encourage the introduction of even limited processes to further the concept of outcome-dependent cost assessment within a practice setting. The limited availability of resources mandates their judicious use throughout medicine. In a field like infertility, by many (rightly or wrongly) perceived as 'elective', the judicious use of resources seems even more necessary since it would permit the treatment of larger patient populations than have currently access to care without further expense to third-party payments.