[Alicia Broussard] Generation Next Fertility, we are a full service boutique fertility center located here in Midtown Manhattan. We do a little bit of everything in the IVF labs. Our mission here is to really kind of customize the treatment for our patients and to make sure that our patients have very much a white glove treatment. We see patients from all over the country, all over the world and they come to us because of our unique care and our very patient-centered focus.
I’m the Laboratory Director of Generation Next. I've been in the field for about 23 years now. I have a big team back there of Embryologists, andrology techs, and lab assistants. We have tanks full of embryos and oocytes and sperm that patients have frozen there to, you know, sometimes preserve their fertility because they had cancer, or sometimes it's even just, you know, their future children they plan to have when their career slows down. I mean, these are patients’ future and hopes and dreams. And it's super important to us that they're protected 24/7.
We've always had an alarm system. Obviously it's a mandatory thing for any sort of Embryology lab to have some sort of alarm system to alarm the incubators and the tanks. The previous alarm system we had, we had a lot of a lot of false alarms and just we didn't feel very confident in the equipment itself as well as that when we received calls, it was very hard for us to know whether it was a false alarm or whether it was something we should truly be alarmed with, which is not a good feeling. It also was kind of antiquated technology and we weren't able to easily log in and be able to get all the information we needed so we were ready to make a change.
We were looking for something that would, first of all, provide us better Peace of Mind that when we actually did get some sort of alarm, it was truly an alarm and something that we needed to address. And then also if there was something that needed to be addressed, we also wanted something that was going to be a little bit more technologically advanced so that we could receive texts we could receive the phone calls and then we could also log in and be able to look at all the data from our phones and from a computer and be able to address things and then to really be able to triage whether someone needed to go into the office.
We always have people on call 24/7, 365 days a year. We did look at some other options. A lot of the other ones actually have to be tethered to a wall and be actually plugged into like electrical and they actually have to be physically tethered. You see how many tanks we have. It's just logistically moving those around when they're tethered to a wall is just a nightmare. We were looking for something that was packed and just was able to let us be in a place like New York City, where space is obviously an issue.
We are very much more of a tech-forward type of company. We prefer to have everything very accessible to us online and be able to log in and get the information we need.
I think SmartSense is a great partner. The team that we first worked with, they were very attentive, they were very good about getting us the information that we needed. All the assets made sense to us. They were able to kind of work with us on solutions. Especially the incubators are a little bit of a tricky item because they're a dry sensor. And so most of the alarm systems, unless they're just specifically tailored only for IVF, a lot of the alarm systems, it's kind of like it's a solution you have to kind of develop. They were able to come back and develop a solution for us really quickly and it just made sense.
What we really liked about SmartSense is that it did also give us the option of having a hard wired Ethernet option. Being in a place like Midtown, obviously there's a lot of cellular towers around here. We're also on a high rise. At certain points of the day, especially kind of in that rush hour evening we noticed we were having issues with cellular. So having that Ethernet option was really attractive to us. Now it works out very well because with the assets, what they do is sometimes they report to Ethernet, sometimes they report to cellular. They're able to kind of jump around between the different gateways. So having that hardwire plus the cellular has really been such a great way for us to not have missed reports, for us to feel really confident that we're getting all of our reporting. And in fact, we knew Ethernet went down at one point because we actually got an alert from SmartSense. And so it's actually been, it's been really good for just kind of like an overall alarming system for us.
SmartSense is on and they're with us 365 days a year. It's always on. We've kind of found our sweet spot as far as like the right timing for it to call us where we feel like we get called quick enough. We don't like it when it's 2:00 AM, but we do want it to call us because that reminds us that it is sensitive. For instance, let's say one of the incubators has been open too many times and it alarms. If we don't, stop that alarm right way, SmartSense will call us and remind us, “Hey, you need to do that.”
Let's say when we fill our liquid hydrogen tanks and we have the lid open for a while. It will tell us, “Hey, your temperature is getting a little too high in this tank. You need to make sure you close the lid.” And those are all good reminders. It's always there to protect us. Luckily, we usually have really good power in Manhattan, but we have had the power flicker, and it does warn us about power outages. It would still alarm us, and I know it continues to store the data and we would have the backup even if our electricity would go out. So SmartSense would let us know, “Hey, guess what, power is out.” We’d immediately go in and start addressing whatever we needed to address.
We've already had two tanks in the past, probably a year or so that SmartSense had basically was able to show me that we were starting to show fluctuations where the tank had been filled, but it was starting to show a lower temperature quicker than it should have. Now, still within safe range again, but it was starting to alert me that those tanks were not holding the temperature that they should have been at the range they should have been. and so that alerted us to basically change out the tanks. And so had we ignored that or had we not had checks in place to be not only measuring and filling those tanks, but also have another way to kind of like accurately be measuring those little fluctuations and that had been left over time, eventually we could have gotten to a point where we had a tank failure. And luckily we had still a long time before that would have happened, but SmartSense was able to show us those little fluctuations in temperature that alerted us that, “Hey, this tank isn't as solid as it used be. It's time to change it out.”
The onboarding training was very easy. They came in and I think it was less than a day that we had everything hooked up, all the tanks and everything. They helped us take out all of our old hardware, put in the new hardware, and then as far as the training, I mean, the system is very easy to use. The staff has been very happy with SmartSense. The Customer Success team has been great. We really don't get false alarms. It's so user friendly. I mean, it's easier than a home alarm system.
I know how to set things up myself, but I always like to have it double checked whenever I get like a new tank before we start putting specimens in there just to make sure that it's set up correctly, that it's on the right phone tree, the right people are going to be called. All those things, I just feel a lot better knowing that everything is secure and going to call out.
We just recently got to the point of time where we were at the two years with the NIST thermometers, and they sent us out the new thermometers and let us know which ones needed to be replaced. All we have to do is simply unscrew it from the asset itself and put the new one on and then it usually might take about 10 minutes for the probe to kind of get acclimated and then it's ready to go.
I think the big difference with us with SmartSense is the ease of use and the ability to actually get more data and be able to trust that when we get information from there. So any sort of alarm or any call that we get from SmartSense is a valid alarm. But really for me, it's there's a lot of good data that you can pull directly from SmartSense, and everyone in my lab can log in and get the information that they need. Everyone can log in from their phone, so it just becomes something that's widely able to be used. I think that the type of assets they have really fit well within our field. That interface is really easy to use. The assets have been really easy to set up. We feel confident when we get those phone calls, that it’s something we need to be aware of or something we need to address.
I mean, I definitely would recommend this for another fertility clinic. I think it's been a really good option for us, and is very important to us to have a partner that we could trust to be able to give us those alerts and give us that time that we can respond and make sure that everything is safe so that you know, I can go to bed at night and know that if something does happen, my cell phone is going to ring and all the cell phones of everyone in my lab is going to ring. We have people on call 24/7. Somebody's going to be able to respond. We're going to be able to log into the system and we're going to see exactly what's going on and be able to respond and react, and to prevent catastrophic events happening to anything here at Generation Next.
