RI Witness

Why RI Witness

Our system for your safety

Mixing up samples in the IVF laboratory has serious consequences for customers and must be avoided at all costs.  Culture dishes and tubes must be labelled and monitored with the utmost care.

The TFP clinics care deeply for your safety, and we use the RI Witness electronic system in addition to traditional labelling of samples. RI Witness is a security system used in leading IVF clinics around the world and is considered to offer the best safety solution. TFP Stork Fertility in Copenhagen and TFP Ciconia Fertility in Aarhus are the first fertility clinics in Denmark to offer this safety enhancement system to patients.

What is RI Witness?

RI Witness is an electronic system that actively prevents mixing up patient samples in the IVF laboratory. In 2010, TFP Kinderwunsch Berlin became the first clinic in Germany to begin using RI Witness. The system has since then developed and is now being used in all our TFP clinics throughout Europe.

RI Witness is based on radio frequency identification (RFID). Each vessel containing an egg, sperm, or embryo sample carries an RFID transponder which encodes the patient's data during the lab process. All work surfaces in the laboratory are electronic and continuously check the IDs of the samples being processed. If there are samples on the work surface that do not belong to the couple, a visual and audible alarm message is issued before sample mixing can occur. This way we ensure your safety.

This is how it works

You will be assigned a chip card containing your encrypted data at the clinic reception area prior to your treatment (insemination, IVF or ICSI). This chip card will be kept in your patient file for you.

This same chip card will be used during the treatment cycle to ensure safe assignment of your samples. The chip card is scanned into a reader before the egg cell selection and your identity is visibly checked on the PC screen so you can be certain that the data displayed is correct.

With the help of the chip card, the lab station is reserved exclusively for your treatment and the culture dishes in which the eggs are collected can only be assigned to you. This is the beginning of a complete sample identification chain in the laboratory that ends in embryo transfer.

Your partner's semen sample will also be identified with a chip card. RI Witness matches the identity of the samples used at each step. This ensures that only the sample assigned to you can be used in your treatment (insemination, IVF, ICSI).

During IUI, the semen sample is synched with the woman's chip card in front of the patients during the semen transfer.