Mamta Vernekar Dighe: Can Technology Make IVF Safer Without Replacing Human Vigilance?
Mamta Vernekar Dighe, Founder and Director at Xenith Advanced Fertility Centre, shared on LinkedIn:
”Can Technology Make IVF Safer, Without Replacing Human Vigilance?
In IVF, one small identification error can have consequences far beyond the laboratory.
Can technology make these errors preventable?
I think about this question more than most people realise.
In almost every other part of medicine, a mix-up can often be caught, corrected, or explained. In IVF, the margin for error is different.
A single mislabelled dish, a single missed verification step, and the consequence is not a delay or a redo.
It is someone’s embryo, someone’s genetic material, someone’s chance at a child. That is why identification and traceability are not just protocol in our labs; they are the foundation everything else stands on.
Electronic witnessing systems are changing what is possible here.
Real-time alerts, digital traceability, automatic cross-checks at every critical step – these tools are designed to catch things a tired human eye might miss at 7pm after a long day.
But I want to be honest about something. Technology is not a replacement for vigilance. It is a support for it.
An alert that gets acknowledged without being understood is just as dangerous as no alert at all. A system can flag a mismatch, but it cannot ask the second question an experienced embryologist instinctively asks.
It cannot pause, think, and say ‘something about this does not feel right,’ the way a trained human can. If we start treating electronic witnessing as a substitute for attention rather than a partner to it, we have actually created a new category of risk, just a quieter one.
My view is simple. The best labs will not be the ones with the most advanced technology.
They will be the ones where technology and human responsibility reinforce each other instead of competing.
Where every embryologist still double-checks, still thinks critically, still treats every dish as if it were the only one in the room, even with a system watching alongside them.
Because at the end of the day, no algorithm carries the weight of what we do.
We do.”
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Oct 12, 2026, 16:01Suganya Venkat: The Kindest Thing to Say After a Failed IVF Cycle Is Not “Try Again”
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