Sending Your Medical Records to a Fertility Clinic Abroad
A clinic that has read your history designs a different protocol than one working from a questionnaire.
The quality of your first consultation is largely determined before it starts, by what the physician has in front of them. Patients who send complete records get specific recommendations. Patients who send nothing get a sales presentation and a generic package.
Gathering records takes a couple of weeks of low-effort follow-up. It is the highest-leverage preparation you can do.
What to gather
Essential
- Day-3 bloodwork — FSH, LH, estradiol, and TSH, with dates
- AMH — with the assay used and the reference range, since labs differ
- Antral follicle count from a baseline ultrasound
- Semen analysis — full parameters, ideally two samples if you have them
- Infectious disease screening for both partners (HIV, hepatitis B and C, syphilis). Nearly all clinics require this and results typically must be within six to twelve months
- Uterine evaluation — HSG, saline sonogram, or hysteroscopy report
Valuable if you have it
- Prior cycle summaries — see below, this is the big one
- Surgical history, especially any pelvic or uterine procedure and its operative report
- Genetic carrier screening or karyotype results
- Thyroid, prolactin, and any endocrine workup
- Recurrent loss workup, if applicable
- Recent pelvic imaging
If you have done a prior IVF cycle, the cycle summary is worth more than everything else combined. It shows what protocol was used, what doses, how many days of stimulation, your estradiol trajectory, how many eggs were retrieved, how many were mature, fertilization rate, blastocyst development, and grading. That is a real experiment on your own physiology, and it lets a new physician adjust rather than guess. Ask for it by name: "the complete cycle summary including the embryology report."
How to request records
In the United States, HIPAA gives you the right to your records. The practical process:
- Ask the clinic for its records release form — most have one, often downloadable.
- Specify you want records released to you directly, in electronic format. Do not have them sent clinic-to-clinic; you want your own copy and you want control of the timing.
- Request everything explicitly: consultation notes, all lab results, imaging reports, operative reports, and cycle summaries with embryology data.
- Expect thirty days by law, though most clinics turn it around in one to two weeks. Follow up at day ten.
- Reasonable copying fees are allowed; electronic delivery is usually free or minimal.
If you are in Canada, the UK, or the EU, equivalent access rights exist under provincial health information legislation, the Data Protection Act, or GDPR respectively. The request process is similar.
When a clinic drags its feet
It happens, occasionally because a practice is disorganized and occasionally because it would prefer you not take your business elsewhere. Put the request in writing, cite your right of access, and state a date. Escalate to the practice manager. Records access is not discretionary.
Format and translation
Send PDFs, not photos of paper. Most international fertility clinics serving foreign patients read English medical documentation fluently, and lab values are largely universal, so professional translation is usually unnecessary for English-language records.
Two things are worth doing yourself:
- Convert units where they differ. AMH in particular is reported in ng/mL in the US and pmol/L in much of the world. Note both. Estradiol may be pg/mL or pmol/L.
- Write a one-page summary at the front: your age, how long you have been trying, diagnoses, treatments attempted and outcomes, and what you are hoping to do next. A physician reading forty pages of scanned documents will read your summary first, and it frames everything else.
Organizing the send
Name files clearly — 2026-03_AMH_result.pdf rather than scan0047.pdf. Put everything in one folder, share it as a single link or a single zipped attachment, and include your summary as the first document. Clinics receive a great deal of disorganized material; being the patient whose records are easy to read has practical benefits.
Send it at least a week before your consultation and ask the coordinator to confirm the physician has received and reviewed it.
What happens on the other end
A physician reviewing your file is looking for a handful of things: your ovarian reserve markers and what response they predict, whether prior protocols under- or over-stimulated you, where in the embryology funnel things fell off, whether there is an unaddressed uterine or male factor, and whether anything in your history changes the risk picture.
When they come to the consultation with observations about your specific history — "your estradiol rise was slow relative to your antral count, which suggests we should start higher" — you are talking to someone engaging with your case. When they open with a package description, you are not, and that is worth knowing before you pay a deposit.
Common Questions
Do I need my records professionally translated?
Usually not for English documents; international clinics serving foreign patients read English medical records routinely. If your records are in another language, ask the clinic whether they can work with them before paying for translation. Convert unit systems yourself either way.
How recent do test results need to be?
Infectious disease screening is typically required within six to twelve months and often has to be repeated. AMH and antral follicle count within about a year are generally acceptable, though clinics frequently repeat them anyway. Semen analysis older than a year is usually repeated. Prior cycle summaries never expire in usefulness.
What if my clinic will not release my embryology report?
You are entitled to it. Ask again in writing, specifying the cycle summary and embryology report by name, and escalate to the practice manager if needed. Some clinics genuinely do not realize patients can request this level of detail.
Should I send records to multiple clinics?
Yes. Once you have assembled the file, sending it to two or three clinics costs nothing and lets you compare how differently they interpret the same information. The variation in proposed protocols is often illuminating.
Thinking about IVF in Colombia?
Medellín and Bogotá clinics run internationally accredited labs at a fraction of US pricing. We can point you toward the right questions and the right people.
See Colombia IVF Options →We may receive referral compensation from clinics at no additional cost to you. This page is information, not medical advice.
Sources & further reading
- US Department of Health and Human Services — HIPAA individual right of access guidance
- ASRM — recommended diagnostic evaluation of the infertile couple