Monitoring and Evaluation of Infertility Treatments: Is There a Priority for Monitoring of Cognitive Function in Children Born from ART and Other Treatments?

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the intentions behind monitoring and evaluation, and highlight how monitoring processes can be used to identify knowledge gaps, and guide innovation for improvements in clinical outcomes. For the present chapter, we focus on the often overlooked longterm outcome of intellectual function among children born after ART. As the assessment of intellectual function has a long latency compared to other developmental outcomes, such as structural birth defects, it is a useful example to demonstrate how innovation outstrips available data to inform clinical decision making, and how routine information systems may be inadequately prepared to monitor complex longterm outcomes. In this sense, intellectual function can be used as an example that could be generalized to other health conditions where there is a long latency between treatment and outcomes, such as metabolic health.