Dear Friends & Colleagues,

At our Biennial Meeting in Budapest earlier this year, I collected feedback via questionnaire regarding KPIs for oocyte and embryo cryopreservation KPIs.  As I explained at the time, the intention was to prepare a formal report on these consensus KPIs that would be made available to all delegates for feedback prior to its publication on the Alpha website.

We received more than 80 responses, which was excellent.  However, after compiling the data we were rather dismayed to discover very wide variations in many of the Indicators – so much that in many instances it was not reasonable to propose a consensus value.  Consequently, we have prepared the attached report of this exercise, which is now considered final.

Naturally we are disappointed in this outcome, but there is a very large silver lining to this dark cloud.  Based on this experience, as well as requests from numerous members at the Budapest conference, the next Alpha Expert Consensus Meeting (to be held some time in 2011) will build on this initial work and propose a comprehensive series of KPIs and benchmarks for oocyte, zygote, cleavage stage embryo, and blastocyst cryopreservation.  This project will result in the publication of a formal report from Alpha, which will be published in RBM Online later in 2011.

I would like to thank wholeheartedly all those of you who responded to the questionnaire in Budapest.  We didn't quite achieve what we hoped, but we shall persevere.  Alpha's over-arching goal is to provide information that will help all its members and, indeed, the entire clinical embryology field, to provide ever-improving services to patients.  This is clearly an area where we can contribute usefully.

Very best wishes to you all,

David Mortimer
Vancouver, Canada

 What are KPIs and Benchmarks? Explanatory remarks by David Mortimer