We will continue to make every effort to include all clinics and practitioners providing ART services in future reports. To have their success rates published in this annual report, clinics have to submit their data in time for analysis, and the clinics medical directors have to verify that the tabulated success rates are accurate. After the data have been verified, a quality control process called validation begins. Two members of the SART Validation Committee visited these clinics and compared medical records data on 50 randomly selected cycles with the data submitted for the report. In almost all cases, data on pregnancies and births in the medical records were consistent with reported data.
Validation primarily helps to ensure that clinics are being careful to submit accurate data.
It also serves to identify any systematic problems that could cause data collection to be inconsistent or incomplete. Although SART compares medical records with data submitted for this report, the validation process does not include any assessment of clinical practice or overall record keeping. A small number of ART cycles are not included in the national data. Only 40 ART cycles fell into this category in 1997. As required by law, this report presents ART success rates in terms of cycles started each year rather than in terms of women.