The Kindbody Story: E2, The Embryo Mixup

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1:14And when losses do happen, the Hartford can pair that risk control work with insurance coverage grounded in underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience developed over time. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, If the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500.

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2:30Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. This series features conversations about pregnancy complications and loss. Please take care while listening. Dina and Bea spent years trying to conceive. They had arduous retrievals, eggs that didn't fertilize, embryos that didn't take. But now, the two women had made it to another transfer day. And this time was different. It was special because they were doing reciprocal IVF for the first time. The embryo that would be transferred into Dina was made with B's egg.

3:20It was a chance to create a profound connection for them both to their future baby. To be as genetically connected as we possibly could for Dina to carry my embryo. To put it blunt, cook my bun. Sitting in the exam room of a clinic in Manhattan, they eagerly waited for their procedure to start. But now, their doctor was telling them that the clinic had made a mistake. They don't remember the exact wording, but here's the gist of it. There's been a situation where the embryo you chose to be defrosted was not, and we defrosted a different embryo, one that belonged to Dina. So they didn't defrost mine, they defrosted Dina's.

4:12Was this kind of the reason behind and the significance behind why you wanted to carry each other's embryos? Was that something that you had shared with your doctor? Oh yeah, they knew. The nurses and the doctors all knew. As Dina and Bea tried to process what was happening, their doctor also looked rattled. You could tell she felt awful. She was mortified, could not stop apologizing. At one point, she brought in the clinic's embryologist to explain. Now, the embryologist isn't someone that patients usually interact with, but they do very important work in IVF. These are the people that handle eggs, sperm, and embryos.

4:56He wasn't admitting to it being his lab, even though it obviously was, and his oversight. I mean, God knows what happened as to why. We don't even know exactly what happened, yeah. So they left the room, and I think we both cried. So it was a plan that we had set out and talked a lot about in the process for sure and thought it would have been so cool and unique. And to not have that happen was devastating, definitely. 100%. Dina and Bea were trying not to panic. We were in disbelief, to be honest, in shock. So what? What happens now? What are our options? So we were absolutely crushed. Yeah, crushed.

5:44And they were confronted with a painful choice. What did they want to do with the embryo that the lab had mistakenly defrosted? And the embryologist sort of took over the conversation and he was like, well your options are to refreeze the one that we have defrosted and we will then defrost the one you wanted and we'll transfer that or we do the transfer with the one that we have defrosted you don't even refreeze chicken we're not refreezing an embryo how can you do that to something that could potentially be a baby.

6:31Dina and Bea had reason to be skeptical about this. Studies show that the process of thawing and refreezing can risk eroding the quality of an embryo. Because of this, experts told me it's relatively uncommon to thaw twice. They told me it's still possible to get pregnant, but it really depends on the quality of the embryo at the outset. Nothing is ever 100 % guaranteed. But, as Dina and Bea remember it, the kind body embryologist said the chances of the embryo transfer leading to a pregnancy would be unchanged. Dina and Bea just weren't buying it. To a point where you're definitely calling bullshit.

7:14Yeah, you weren't believing it. No way. And also, we didn't have many embryos at all. Every single one was so precious and valuable. The embryology lab is the heart of a fertility clinic. In here, patients' hopes of making a baby are in the hands of embryologists who do painstakingly precise work, and the environment has to be just right. Temperature, humidity, air quality, all of these things have to be absolutely perfect. When I first heard about Dina and Bea's embryo mix-up, I wondered if it was an isolated incident. After months of investigating, I learned that it wasn't. Kindbody didn't deny the mistakes happened, but didn't comment on specifics other than to say that it had completed incident reports.

8:07The company also said that accidents happen across the fertility industry. But here's what makes reporting on fertility so complicated. This is a field where success is never guaranteed, even when things go more or less okay during treatment. Heartbreak is built into the process. So how do you distinguish between inevitable disappointments and preventable mistakes? How many errors are too many? And in an industry with little oversight, how would anyone even know? From Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts, this is IVF Disrupted, the kind body story. I'm Jackie DeVallos.

9:00I wanted to understand how the mistake involving Dina and Bea's embryo occurred, and if this was a one-off error or a pattern of mistakes at Kindbody. To do this, I reached out to dozens of current and former employees. I learned that in 2021, the same year that Kindbody thawed the wrong embryo for Dina and B at its Bryant Park lab, Kindbody accidentally destroyed two other embryos at the same location. Former employees told me one was dropped on the ground, another was damaged after accidentally being left out in room temperature. This happened to be that patient's very last embryo. She was offered unlimited free IVF to make up for the mistake, but she never managed to conceive at Kind Body.

9:49It's unclear what or who is responsible for these embryos being mixed up or destroyed. But as I talked to former employees, some themes started to emerge about a series of conditions that opened Kind Body up to mistakes. According to former employees I spoke with, one of these problems was persistent understaffing. Tracy Sosa, the medical assistant who worked with Dina and Bea, said that their clinic in Princeton didn't have a full-time doctor or an embryology lab even a year after opening. Kindbody's solution was to send doctors who worked in nearby clinics to see patients in New Jersey. And when patients like Dina and Bea needed procedures, they were asked to travel into Manhattan to other Kindbody clinics.

10:37This isn't standard in the fertility industry, but KindBody told its staff it was a temporary solution. Here's Tracy. The doctors that did flow through there, they were just not there on a consistent basis to build the appropriate return with the patient base. Not fair to the patient and not fair to the skeleton crew that they came there for almost two years. Meanwhile, Tracy watched while KindBody was opening new clinics in Atlanta, the Bay Area, in Orlando. We still didn't have a full-time MD, and they were taking on opening up another 10 practices. I bet you take care of the ones that are already open before you go ahead willy-nilly opening up another 10.

11:18There were other practices that were already open that were having issues too, not just Princeton. Why are you opening? Why do you have plans knocking down walls for another 10? Kind Body Disney, Kind Body this. Get down here. Stop with your nonsense. In comments for this podcast, Kind Body said it's common industry practice for its fertility doctors to work in multiple locations within a chain of clinics. Tracy said the shuffle of patients back and forth between locations created confusion and made staff more vulnerable to making errors. The patients I spoke with said sometimes details about a treatment plan were miscommunicated from one nurse to another.

11:58Or medication dosages got messed up. Or a procedure was scheduled at one clinic, but the clinic performing that procedure didn't get the memo. And even when patients did end up at Kind Bodies Clinics in Manhattan, whether it was in Bryant Park or Flatiron, those locations were also struggling. We were bare bones with staff, trying to be able to see patients, although that's what it's supposed to be about. That was always the least important part to them. We're calling this woman Lauren. We are not using her real name. She, and some others you'll hear from in the series, asked for anonymity because Kindbody has threatened legal action against employees they believed were talking to journalists.

12:46We agreed to have a voice actor read what she told us in an interview. Lauren was part of Kindbody's clinical staff in New York's Bryan Park and Flatiron Clinics in 2021. They wanted to spend money on the things that were seen outwardly. Every week, we had huge bouquets of flowers in the office. They did a lot of videos. They had professional photographers, professional videographers coming in to do all these things. All that was way more important than medical care. They didn't want a staff. And so they went from four nurses to one. And they quit because they kept being told, well, we're a startup.

13:25We just need you to buck up. We need you to do the job. This is what it is. So they'd be working 12-hour days or more, five, six plus days a week. It was just, we're going to spread the same amount of existing work over those who are left. During this time, she says the turnover also started to affect the most important part of an IVF clinic, the embryology lab. I reached out to former lab employees who told me it was hard to keep up with the mounting patient load and that training for new staff was rushed. They also said that lab leadership kept changing and embryologists were on the verge of burnout.

14:06So former employees said Kindbody had major staffing problems, but they also said the company wasn't spending enough money on the labs themselves. I was brought on as the lead embryologist with potential to have some input and ideologies about how this is going to be built out. That's Stephanie Maddy. Stephanie had been working as an embryologist for about seven years when she was recruited by Kindbody in 2019. These were the early startup days, when Kindbody was offering hormone testing from the bright yellow bus. They hadn't completed construction on their first clinic yet. Stephanie specialized in egg freezing, but the company wanted her help in thinking about how to build out their embryology labs and IVF practice.

14:51Soon after she started the job, she started to feel concerned and began asking questions. How can we establish ourselves so that we are building a lab and what is our goal? These were just never conversations that were had or topics that seemed to come forth. Early on, she moved into a brand new clinic on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan along with other KindBody staff. And while she was impressed by its entrance and waiting room, she says that behind the scenes, the lab facilities were lacking. For one, there was no embryology lab at the new office. And while it did have a semen analysis lab, she says the way it was set up felt like an afterthought.

15:36They literally built it into this closet space. You would open the door and basically it was a very awkward shape. It went to a point in the back. It's supposed to be a utility closet. It's not supposed to. It's not a room. It's not an office. It's a utility closet. It seemed like so much money was being invested into what it looked like forward-facing. I was so surprised that it was like, oh, no, no, we're doing semen analysis in basically this tiny closet space. The company told her a bigger space was coming. But for now, this was where her work had to be done. We had one desk up against the wall.

16:19And usually you'd want a hood of some kind because of fumes or any kind of pathogens. And granted, as embryologists, we took every precaution necessary to be able to maintain a proper standard. When you have so much money being fueled into a company, and then, you know, you go to the back and this is what you're dealing with. I've worked in everything from fully funded hospital labs things like ventilation are super important and things like that which had not been established into the building and this was just kind of like you know what they called like a temporary situation but it was just frustrating to see that again I'm not like I don't run businesses but I do understand laboratories and my specialty comes from you know being in different all different kinds of labs because when we're walking into our labs, we have to know what's going on because it directly affects our embryos.

17:14Ventilation systems are important because they filter out toxic fumes, vapors, or dusts that could harm the sample an embryologist is handling. Things like, you know, acetaldehydes, styrene, which, you know, polystyrene, that's plastics. You know, a lot of this can come from petroleum products, so road construction, glues, you know, laying down carpets, laying down tiles. There's a lot of these things that we call their embryo toxic. You know, these things get into your air, get into your incubators. You know, they can really affect how embryos grow. They can even affect pregnancy rates. This is Eva Schenkman.

17:50She's been an embryologist for over 30 years. After working for fertility clinics all over the East Coast, she struck out on her own as a consultant and started a training program for aspiring embryologists. Around the time the first couple of Kindbody clinics were cropping up, Kindbody's founder, Gina, courted her in hopes of bringing Eva on board to run some of its labs. And Eva said she had some questions. It had a very, very nice pitch, but I'm more interested in the science behind the labs than the front room. I want to see the back room. I don't care about your front room. I wanted to know more about the air handling systems they were building in the lab.

18:32what sort of technology they were incorporating. Think of air handling systems like a protective shield for the lab. Things like HVAC systems regulate temperature, humidity, and air quality to create the ideal environment for embryos to thrive. Even the smallest disruption in these conditions could affect whether an IVF procedure succeeds or fails. I've worked at a lab where we saw a drop in pregnancy rates, and it was later attributed to the building over was getting the roof retarmacked for the helicopter pad. And our air intake system was just downwind from where the helipad was going to be.

19:14So as they were pouring, you know, all of that asphalt and all of those petroleum-based products, that stuff was getting sucked right into our HVAC system. So Eva was skeptical about Kyanbody's founding strategy of putting everything, labs and clinics, under one roof, in places with lots of foot traffic. Putting things in a retail heavy section, whether it's near a soul cycle or yoga or something else, it's like putting a scientific lab in a mall. You're going to have issues. You've got to probably close to the roof because you need to usually mount those systems on the roof. These air handling systems, they're not cheap.

19:51Eva said she noticed the labs were small, but she said Kindbody told her that these labs were just a starting point. Bigger labs would be built down the line. But Eva also saw that some of Kindbody's leases were as short as five years in some cases. It didn't seem plausible to her that they would be rebuilt in time to manage the flow of patients that Kindbody was aiming for. It just seemed like it was setting it up for these were going to be very short-staffed. Labs weren't up to the size that I would have said that they needed for the volume that they wanted to do. Eva said conversations with Kindbody fizzled out.

20:31I would rather align myself with a project where I can build a lab, and I want it to be one of the best labs out there that is going to be providing a safe environment for these embryos. I would have been very frustrated if that wasn't something that I was free to do. As for Stephanie, she said that to her, all of this, the tiny lab in the MacGyvered closet, the promises of upgrades down the line, revealed what Kindbody was actually prioritizing. As much as they were spending money, it seemed like forward-facing and developing the front-facing clinics, like the facades, I called them. There was constantly this, okay, how can we save money?

21:09How can we cut costs? It was just, again, shocking to see so many offices opening up. And while that was happening, our embryology program felt like it was falling behind all of that. Disillusioned, Stephanie quit after just a few months. In the year after she left, Kindbody opened four clinics and started to pick up the pace. At one point in 2021, there was a new clinic about every other month. I talked to a former employee who was hired to help with the expansion during this time. He also asked for anonymity to discuss Kindbody. A voice actor is reading what he told me. That is an astronomical growth spurt.

21:55When I was brought on, there were some problems with projects that were already underway. This included Bryant Park, where former employees told me HVAC issues were a constant problem. But more issues cropped up. In Austin, employees told me that a sewer pipe that released foul-smelling gases into the clinic took weeks to fix. In Atlanta, the ceiling above the nursing station collapsed and unleashed a flood of water from the vent. When I asked Kindbody about these incidents, it acknowledged the disruptions, saying the company took immediate action and that no patients, tissue, or embryos were directly impacted.

22:36But former employees said that instead of slowing down and fixing issues at existing clinics, the company just kept opening new ones. The employee who worked on expansion said KindBody's rush to open clinics started to catch up with the company. And what's so unfortunate is everything needs to stay perfect in these circumstances because how fragile the situation is. And again, I think a lot of that was the hype of how amazing Kind Body should be and can be. And it was a real pressing on all of us to go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And when you go faster, sometimes you miss an exit. Sometimes you run off the road a little bit and you just got to keep going.

23:22We'll be right back.

23:31Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined.

24:09An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by public investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.

24:50If you come over here to play games, I'm going to check you, okay? If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'm gonna play you. Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast, You're the Problem with Yamanika. Do you know I just found out who Sydney Sweeney was? New episodes weekly every Wednesday as part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network. If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. So join Yamanika each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem?

25:27I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:40I'm Jake Brennan. And on the Disgraceland podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard. The kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in one of the world's most notorious prisons. Imagine that. You're Paul McCartney. It's 1980. You're an ex-Beatle. And you're doing time in one of Japan's worst prisons right there alongside Yakuza gangsters and for a ridiculous charge. Or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of. Who is the artist Lady Gaga is being accused of doing the unthinkable to after allegedly stealing her music and style to become famous?

26:29And what about that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped a serial killer? The man who had given her that ride she barely escaped from was Ted Bundy. Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dina and Bea, the couple from New Jersey, knew nothing about the concerns embryologists had raised about Kindbody's early labs when Dina was sitting on the exam table, hearing that Kindbody had defrosted the wrong embryo. And remember, they were up in New York at the Bryant Park Clinic because their clinic in Princeton didn't even have a lab or an embryologist.

27:10But here they were. And now they had to decide what to do next. We couldn't take a risk. No. Of this refreezing process. At this point, Dina and Bea say they didn't trust the doctor or the embryologist. They didn't have time to consult family, a friend, or another medical provider. So we were like, okay, absolutely devastated. let's just put that aside because we'll handle that later we were like okay we've quickly got to shake that off because we've a got to make a decision and b got to be really happy with the decision because we know so much of a successful transfer is in your mindset and for your body to be aligned chemically with good vibes let's get positive and excited about whatever decision we're about to make.