Reproductive Medicine Associates of Florida lead physician and medical director, Dr. George Patounakis helps the dreams of would-be parents become realized through compassionate, personalized care and the most advanced treatments.

Infertility is a struggle for many couples and the journey to becoming a parent through fertility medicine can be an emotional one. That’s something Dr. George Patounakis, medical director of Reproductive Medicine Associates (RMA) of Florida, understands intimately having helped hundreds of couples along the path to parenthood through fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), ovulation induction (OI) and intrauterine insemination (IUI).

“It’s truly an honor and a privilege to be part of these people’s lives as they go through this sensitive time in their life,” he says. “Being somebody there to not only deliver the medical aspects of the care, but also the emotional aspects of the care is extremely important and also very rewarding.”

Supportive, wraparound care is to be expected at RMA, a leader in assisted reproductive technology and fertility care, research and innovation. With 19 locations in the United States, RMA provides IVF, OI and IUI, along with embryo and egg freezing for people who are preparing for a future pregnancy.

Dr. Patounakis leads RMA’s Central Florida office. He holds an M.D. from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, and he completed his OB/GYN residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He then went on to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland to undergo fellowship training in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility.

With the current coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Patounakis’ office and staff are taking precautions and advising would-be parents about pursuing fertility.

“As of now, nobody’s telling couples that have no fertility issues to abstain from trying to get pregnant,” Dr. Patounakis says. “So as long as those couples are not being restricted from getting pregnant, there’s no reason to restrict patients who are infertile from receiving treatment for getting pregnant.”

In addition, RMA’s office in Lake Mary has implemented a comprehensive risk mitigation process to combat the spread of the coronavirus and to continue to provide the quality of care patients expect.

Still, Dr. Patounakis says couples should evaluate their tolerance for risk.

“We probably won’t know for about another year what really the outcome is going to be from all this,” he says.

Although infertility can feel isolating, it’s not uncommon. About one in eight couples have trouble conceiving a child in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But there is a lot of hope for those who wish to become parents. And in fact, fertility medicine has made strides over the years in being able to deliver the dream of parenthood to many more people.

“The paradigm for fertility treatment has changed since I started versus now,” Dr. Patounakis says.

He recalls his early days of training in fertility medicine when embryos, which are used in IVF treatments, could not be cultured for more than a few days outside the mother’s womb. Today, these same embryos can be grown outside the womb for up to a week, allowing doctors to be more selective in deciding which embryo to implant. This decreases the number of embryos that have to be transferred to the mother and leads to fewer occurrences of twins and triplets.

Of course, there’s always more innovations to be made in fertility medicine, which is why RMA has its own research program, making the organization a driving force in the discovery of new medical advancements.

“We can take a lot of that research and put it back into the clinical practice,” Dr. Patounakis says.

Yet, for all that can be done through medicine, there is no substitute for the personal touch of a caring physician. Dr. Patounakis is well-known for his compassionate, hands-on approach to patient care and he says he is proud to be a part of each patient’s path to parenthood.

“One of the driving factors that keep me going is seeing these couples go through their journeys to parenthood,” he says. “And some are longer than others. Some have more bumps in their journey than others, but there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the end result.”

Reproductive Medicine Associates of Florida
Serving Central Florida
400 Colonial Center Parkway ǀ Suite 150 ǀ Lake Mary
407-804-9670 | RMANetwork.com

This article originally appeared in Orlando Family Magazine’s August 2020 issue.