Fertility clinics have always adapted to change, new clinical techniques, new regulations, new laboratory standards, new patient expectations. But the next major shift won’t come from medicine. It will come from the technology infrastructure that underpins how clinics operate, how they make decisions, and ultimately how they deliver care.
What we see today across the global IVF market is a very predictable pattern. Fertility clinics fall into three broad categories when it comes to digital transformation:
The first movers who actively shape the future,
The fast followers who adopt once they see results elsewhere,
And the late movers who eventually shift only when the cost of staying with their current systems becomes unsustainable.
None of these categories reflect how good or ambitious a fertility clinic or a network is; they simply reflect how quickly the clinic recognises the pressures coming toward the industry, pressures that are very different from what the market experienced a decade ago.
The first movers
These are the fertility clinics and networks that have already accepted that the way fertility will be delivered five years from now will not look like it does today. They are consolidating systems, standardising workflows, investing in modern infrastructure, and replacing fragmented tools with unified platforms. They treat digital transformation as an operational redesign rather than a software procurement exercise. Their payoff is early: better visibility, more predictable operations, and a data foundation that makes future AI strategies actually feasible.
The fast followers
This group waits for evidence. They watch the early movers closely and, once they see that new systems genuinely improve throughput, patient experience, reporting, and financial visibility, they move quickly. There is nothing wrong with this approach; it’s pragmatic and it limits early risk. But it also means that, once they decide to change, the leap is often bigger and the competitive advantage smaller.
The late movers
This is the largest and most vulnerable group. These clinics generally stay on their existing systems until something forces their hand: a legacy EMR reaches end-of-life, a critical integration breaks, the platform no longer meets cybersecurity requirements, or they find themselves unable to extract basic operational or clinical data to run the business. Many of them are not unwilling to modernise, they simply haven’t felt the consequences yet. But those consequences are approaching faster than most expect.
Why this shift is inevitable
The need to modernise is not driven by hype or by new tools looking for problems. It’s driven by a fundamental mismatch between today’s demands on fertility clinics and the systems most clinics still run on.
Legacy EMRs were built for a different era
Many of the established EMRs in fertility were built 15–20 years ago in programming languages and architectures that were entirely appropriate for their time, but are now extremely difficult to evolve. These systems were not designed for cloud architecture, modern APIs, high-volume integrations, real-time data flows, or the cybersecurity landscape clinics now operate in. They were also built with business models that made sense then, charging for updates, interfaces, and customisations, but which now slow down innovation and leave fertility clinics dependent on vendors for even basic changes.
Most importantly, these systems were not built with the assumption that clinics would need to analyse data at scale, benchmark sites across a network, or prepare for AI-driven decision support. Retrofitting those capabilities into old codebases is not a matter of “upgrading the system”; it is a structural rebuild that can take years and often requires an entirely different engineering organisation than the vendor currently has.
Fragmented tech stacks create invisible risk
Across our implementations we often see clinics operating with five, eight, sometimes ten different systems stitched together to run daily operations. On the ground that means inconsistent data capture, repeated manual entry, incompatible workflows, and a complete lack of reliable visibility across the patient journey. It also means far greater cyber exposure. Every additional system, integration, and access layer increases the attack surface, and healthcare has become one of the most targeted industries globally. Even well-run fertility clinics face unnecessary risk simply because the underlying stack was never designed as a cohesive whole.
The future of fertility is data-driven, and data must exist first
Fertility clinics increasingly want to improve outcomes through better decision-making, to personalise patient care, to streamline laboratory operations, to forecast cycles more accurately, and to support clinicians and embryologists with insights rather than guesswork. Private equity groups expect networks to demonstrate consistency across sites and to improve margins without compromising quality. All of these goals depend on something most clinics currently lack: consistent, structured, trustworthy data captured in one place.
The fertility industry talks about AI constantly, but AI is an output, not an input. Without unified data, AI is impossible to operationalise and even more impossible to validate clinically. A predictive model is only as good as the data beneath it; right now, for most fertility clinics, that data is fragmented, inconsistent, and stored in formats that machine learning systems cannot use safely.
What this means for clinics, networks, and their investors
The clinics that move now are building the foundation that will carry them for the next decade. They reduce operational drag, consolidate complexity, improve staff retention, and unlock analytics that are actionable rather than aspirational. Fertility networks gain the ability to standardise, benchmark, and scale without carrying the technical debt of every acquisition they make.
Fast followers still have time to make the transition deliberately, but the cost of waiting is growing, particularly as cybersecurity requirements tighten and vendor support cycles shorten.
Late movers will face the most difficult transition. They will be pushed into change not by strategic ambition, but by the practical breakdown of systems they rely on: unsupported legacy platforms, higher operating costs, inability to meet security standards, and growing competitive disadvantage as more modern clinics outperform them operationally and clinically.
Our market view
Legacy EMRs played an important role in getting the industry to where it is today, and many fertility clinics have delivered excellent care on top of them. But the market around these systems has evolved faster than the systems themselves, not because vendors are negligent, but because the technical and business model foundations they were built on no longer match the demands of a data-driven, AI-enabled, security-sensitive healthcare environment.
The next era of fertility will be shaped by the fertility clinics and networks that recognise this early and decide, proactively, to build durable infrastructure instead of waiting for a crisis to force a decision. Modernisation is no longer a “nice to have”; it is a requirement for clinical excellence, operational sustainability, financial resilience, and future competitiveness.
