Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dr. Eric Levens. Fantastic bedside manner. Always called me personally after a procedure and gave me the opportunity to ask questions. I was initially under the care of a different doctor at SG but decided to transfer to him after several frustrating months. Best decision. We have DS1 thanks to him.

Dr. Levens takes tons of patients but he also is in high demand.

+1 to Dr. Levens. In addition to his impressive credentials, he has been an exceptionally kind human and responsive communicator.

Dr Khan, but he isn’t convenient to most people on this board, since he works in the SG Leesburg office. He was absolutely wonderful to work with - very responsive, conducted quite a few of my monitoring ultrasounds himself (I saw him for both IUIs and IVF), and was available for a chat on the phone or quick in-office consultation any time I made the request.

Anonymous wrote:Dr. Eric Levens. Fantastic bedside manner. Always called me personally after a procedure and gave me the opportunity to ask questions. I was initially under the care of a different doctor at SG but decided to transfer to him after several frustrating months. Best decision. We have DS1 thanks to him.

Dr. Levens takes tons of patients but he also is in high demand.

Dr. Eric Levens. Fantastic bedside manner. Always called me personally after a procedure and gave me the opportunity to ask questions. I was initially under the care of a different doctor at SG but decided to transfer to him after several frustrating months. Best decision. We have DS1 thanks to him.

A note that, at least at K Street, they no longer allow you to pick a single nurse, the doctors instead have nursing teams cover for them and you get your response from whatever nurse happens to get your message, which can lead to a lot of inconsistency.

I was a patient of Dr. Chang. This is my understanding of how procedures work at SG, but someone please correct me.

If you fall within certain standard parameters, they have their suggested protocols and that's what they follow.

If your case becomes more difficult, they consult with a "group" of doctors within the practice. So, you ultimately get the benefit of many eyes/minds on your case.

That said, I would pick a nurse that was easily reachable and had great communication since that is your front-line for dealing with SG. I don't think the doctors are very easy to reach intentionally.

Don’t do Dr. Levy if you want to talk to your doctor frequently. His appointments run almost a month ahead. I’ve had three egg retrievals. First ER, He called me once before and once after to discuss my concerns. He also did my first ER. The second time, I never talked to him but he did my ER. I had no contact with him on my third retrieval. When I have questions, I talk to his nurses.

Anonymous wrote:I saw Dr. Osborne at the Sibley location up until our success a couple years ago. I wouldn’t describe her as super warm and fuzzy but I certainly spoke to her on the phone before and after significant points in my treatment and since it’s a small location, I often saw her for monitoring appointments along the way.

+1 totally agree with this PP. When I really wanted to talk to her, we asked for an appt and went in (this was pre Covid and maybe it could be virtual now). All my regular calls were with the nurse.

Btw if you find your nurse dismissive, you can also request a different one. We did (for other reasons, she seemed incompetent) and it was much better.

I had no problem getting in touch with Dr Widra. The nurses answer all of the portal messages, but he was available for calls when I requested specially to talk with him.

I also saw Dr. Doyle and found that I needed to ask/make clear that I wanted to hear from him directly. Once I did so, he was extremely responsive and reached out himself frequently. I suspect that I was low priority during IUIs (probably fairly) but much more on his radar once we moved to IVF.

Anonymous wrote:Joseph Doyle. His nurse is also fantastic. Definitely recommend.

+1 for Dr Doyle. Aside from some IUI’s that didn’t work, he otherwise was always on top of it and made sure to call and discuss results and next steps. Always wanted to know what I wanted next. He made sure to keep calling and calling until he got a hold of me. Many times on the weekend or late evening hours if he didn’t get me during working hours or right at 5PM. If I told his nurse I needed to talk to him, he’d call right away.

I didn’t have a good experience with his nurse(s). I was tossed around a lot especially during multiple cycles when I was down the most with miscarriages. He had maybe 2-4 nurses at one time.

I saw Dr. Osborne at the Sibley location up until our success a couple years ago. I wouldn’t describe her as super warm and fuzzy but I certainly spoke to her on the phone before and after significant points in my treatment and since it’s a small location, I often saw her for monitoring appointments along the way.

Joseph Doyle. His nurse is also fantastic. Definitely recommend.

We were patients of Dr. Jeanne O’Brien at the Rockville location for almost 5 years. She would call to discuss results, discuss next steps, commiserate when things didn’t work and also gave us her email to follow up if we needed to. We seldom used this, but it was good to know. Our case was quite complicated though. I don’t know how things are these days as SGF seems to have expanded quite a bit in the past few years.

Does anyone have a doctor at Shady Grove they are able to contact directly to ask questions to/who you feel is actually responsive? If so, could you share their name? I have been at SG for years and am getting very frustrated at the inability to ever talk to my doctor. All portal messages are answered by the nursing team who tend to be very dismissive of my concerns and just say things are normal (though they often are not), and even after a recent loss I have had no real contact with my doctor whatsoever and the nursing team just says everything is fine and I can restart treatment whenever I want. I would really like a doctor who a) bothers to express condolences for a loss, and b) when a patient suffers multiple losses works together to come up with a plan instead of just suggesting that I keep paying huge amounts of money out of pocket to repeat the exact same process that just failed.