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How a fast-growing IVF provider turned documentation into another source of efficiency: an AI scribe every specialist will actually use, support across every site, and records built to stand up to scrutiny.
Most IVF in Australia is expensive, which puts a critical service out of reach for many families. Connect IVF opened in Sydney in 2021 to serve the part of the market the traditional providers price out: bulk-billed, genuinely affordable IVF. Streamlining clinical documentation was a key part of making that model work.
Every consult produces clinical notes, letters to GPs, treatment plans and clear patient education. Across a growing team of specialists, that work adds up fast. So when Connect IVF went looking for an AI documentation solution, it was not chasing a generalist solution built for GPs. It was looking for another place to improve the doctor and patient experience whilst lowering operational costs without impacting quality.
Before Medow, their fertility specialists wrote all of their own notes and letters. An earlier attempt at traditional dictation software had not stuck. It needed too much editing and hands-on effort to be worth the trouble, so it fell out of use.
That set the bar. Connect IVF put five AI platforms through their paces, and the deciding factor was not the longest feature list. It was simple: would every specialist, whatever their comfort with technology, actually use it inside a consult? Only one passed that test.
What set Medow apart is that it is the AI scribe built for fertility, not a generalist tool pointed at the specialty. Where most scribes run a single general model, Medow runs a dedicated fertility model, shaped around how these consults actually happen: more than one patient in the room, IVF protocols and medication plans, and the conditional next steps that hinge on test results.
Medow was by far the easiest for specialists to use within a consult environment.
Ease of use got Medow onto the shortlist. The support behind it is why Connect chose it. Rolling software out across specialists spread over several sites is not simple: getting everyone into one room was, for Connect IVF CEO Brendan, pretty much impossible. Medow worked around it, with a dedicated point of contact and hands-on onboarding that fit real clinic life instead of forcing the clinic to fit the software.
For a lean team without spare administrative capacity, having a real person to reach took the risk out of implementation.
Another reason Connect went looking was compliance. Scrutiny across the industry is increasing, and telehealth-heavy IVF sits squarely in the frame. The standard a practice has to meet is not complicated, but it is unforgiving: documentation that is consistent, complete, summarised and sent to the referring GP. Not most of the time. Every consult, every specialist, every site.
This is a problem that Medow solves. When the documentation is produced the same way in every consult, the standard holds by default rather than by discipline.
It is a benefit Connect IVF CEO Brendan Ayres thinks most doctors underrate.
Doctors will consider the convenience. They do not often consider the compliance benefits as well.
For a practice built on high volumes of affordable, telehealth-heavy IVF, documentation that withstands a review is a way of protecting the practice.
When every specialist documents to the same standard, the practice runs as one clinic rather than a set of individual habits, and adding the next specialist gets easier rather than harder. It delivers consistency of care.
It streamlines what we do, and therefore what the specialists do. It makes onboarding easier, and it makes the specialists' lives easier.
Documentation once added over an hour of writing time to every clinic day. Medow gives that time back and lifts the mental load, so the work is finished inside the clinic day. Notes are reviewed, marked off, and letters reach GPs within a day, sent as they are ready rather than in a weekly backlog.
It is better to send the GP letters out as they’re ready, rather than a week's work landing on you all at once.
Getting letters to GPs promptly and reliably also feeds the referral stream that a growing practice runs on.
Fertility consultations are among the most personal in medicine, often emotional and rarely linear. Anything that lets a specialist spend less of that time looking at a screen or scribbling in a notebook is worth having.
Medow has allowed them to focus on the patients more and lessen the documentation side.
Connect IVF keeps IVF treatment affordable by running an efficient practice, and Medow is now part of that. Every specialist uses it, every site is supported, and the records hold up to scrutiny. For any fertility practice with the same goal, the lesson is simple. Efficiency is not about cutting costs. It is how you grow while keeping care affordable.
