New Web site for IVF success rates

If you're considering IVF, one of the important decisions you'll make is the choice of a clinic to perform the IVF procedure.  The new Web site for the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) provides IVF success rates for clinics in the US.  Fertility clinics are required to report the outcome of every ART procedure to the US CDC (Center for Disease Control), but getting those statistics published has generally lagged 2 to 3 years behind.  The new SART Web site seeks to streamline reporting fertility statistics and making them available sooner. Statistics are currently available through 2004, putting the US far ahead of Europe, where it generally takes 4 years to collect publish ART data. 

Begging the question of why, in the age of the World Wide Web, we do not have virtually up-to-the-minute ART statistics?  Our local middle school updates children's grades via  the Web once weekly, yet it takes YEARS to collate a few simple bits of data about a single IVF cycle?

In any case, you should beware of putting too much stock in a clinic's success rate alone, because it's far from telling the whole story.  The pregnancy rate can be misleading if there are too few cases; for example, one clinic had an impressive 50% pregnancy rate for women over 40, but it turned out only 4 women over 40 had been treated.  Some clinics are also guilty of "cherry picking", or treating only patients who seem to have a good chance of becoming pregnant, and turning away those who may have poor odds.