Case Study 09. Embryo Donation Platform, Specialty Fertility Practice
Industry: Healthcare and Medical Software. Timeline: 2019 to Present.
The Problem.
A specialty fertility practice needed a way to run its entire embryo donation program as a single system: from the moment a donor or recipient applies, through medical screening, matching, allocation, reservation, payment, and tracking each transfer to completion. Embryo donation is medically complex, legally sensitive, and operationally demanding, and no off-the-shelf software exists to manage it. The practice needed something built specifically for the way this work actually happens.
The Solution.
I have been building that platform for the practice for the past five years, and the work is ongoing. It is a complete custom system, and every part of it maps to a real step in the practice’s process.
Donors and recipients apply through a guided application instead of paper forms. Each prospective embryo is scored against a defined set of medical and biological factors, so matching rests on consistent criteria rather than memory or scattered spreadsheets. A matching and allocation engine pairs recipients with embryos by priority and manages timed, exclusive offer windows, so an offer goes to one recipient at a time under clear rules. Reservations and payments run through the system with secure, compliant handling of card data, so sensitive financial information is never left exposed. Batches are tracked and labeled, the right notifications go out automatically at each step, and donors, recipients, and staff each work in their own separate, purpose-built view of the system.
Underneath, it is a custom platform built on OroCommerce and Symfony, engineered to be dependable in a setting where a mistake is not an option.
The Outcome.
This is one of the most complex custom software engagements an independent consultant can take on, and the practice has trusted me with it for five years. It brings together medical domain knowledge, the care that healthcare data demands, secure payment handling, custom matching logic, and a patient-facing experience that has to be right the first time, every time.
The platform is in active development and deployment, with the full program now being readied for launch.
[To add on launch, pending the practice’s sign-off: operational results measured in the practice’s own terms. This case is written to be updated as the engagement progresses.]
More than any single feature, this engagement shows what I do at the core: take a process that is complex, high-stakes, and specific to one organization, and turn it into a system that runs it reliably.