Suleena Kansal Kalra, MD, MSCE

About

Someone has to be responsible when a fertility clinic’s process fails, and at Penn that someone is Suleena Kalra: director of quality and safety for the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility. The role covers the unglamorous machinery of an IVF program — medication reconciliation, identification checks at retrieval and transfer, laboratory handling of gametes and embryos, adverse event review. She is also the physician champion for patient experience in Penn’s obstetrics and gynecology department, which means complaints and survey data land on her desk and she is expected to change something because of them.

Kalra trained for that job twice over. An MD from Albany Medical College in 2001, residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, then Penn for REI fellowship — finished in 2008 — and a master’s in clinical epidemiology in 2007, the degree that teaches how to measure care instead of asserting it. She certified in obstetrics and gynecology in 2005 and holds the rank of Professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology. One caveat on this page: the research file for her is a stub, so her titles — quality and safety director, professor, patient-experience champion — come from the practice’s own record and still need checking against a collected profile.

Her clinical focus is the hormone-and-metabolic end of infertility: PCOS management, individualized gonadotropin dosing for patients who over- or under-responded on a previous cycle, recurrent pregnancy loss, endometriosis, tubal disease, uterine anomalies, and low ovarian reserve. She works at the Washington Square office and is part of the division’s PCOS and LGBTQ health programs, so donor-sperm and preservation cases sit in the same schedule as stimulated cycles. Her published research follows the quality thread — applying epidemiologic methods to assisted reproduction outcomes and safety improvements.

Clinical Expertise

• IVF with dose individualization — gonadotropin and antagonist protocols adjusted to prior response, BMI, AMH and antral follicle count, which is also the PCOS hyper-response problem
• PCOS management — ovulation induction, metabolic risk, and long-term follow-up through the division’s PCOS program
• Stimulation safety — ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome prevention and the monitoring cadence that supports it, a natural extension of a quality-and-safety brief
• Reproductive laboratory and cycle process oversight — identification, consent and handling standards for retrieval, biopsy, freezing and transfer
• Recurrent pregnancy loss — endocrine, anatomic and genetic evaluation before the next attempt
• Fertility preservation — egg, embryo and ovarian tissue freezing, including for patients with premature ovarian insufficiency risk
• Patient experience measurement — survey and complaint data used to change scheduling and communication, not just reported

Why Choose Dr. Kalra

She audits the system you are about to enter. Choosing a clinic usually means reading a success-rate table and hoping. Kalra is on the inside of the checks that keep an egg, an embryo and a consent form attached to the right patient.

An epidemiologist’s habits. With an MSCE, she frames a recommendation in terms of denominators and comparison groups, which is useful when a patient asks whether a protocol’s advertised rate means anything.

Individualized dosing as a stated specialty. The patients who come to her are frequently the ones whose first cycle produced too many or too few eggs.

Complaints have a destination. As patient experience champion, the feedback loop she manages is one she also answers to, which tends to keep wait times and phone responsiveness honest.

Center City location at Washington Square, with monitoring appointments closer for many Philadelphia patients than University City.

Professional Affiliations

American Society for Reproductive Medicine; American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; Philadelphia Reproductive Endocrinology Society. Board-certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology (2005), REI fellowship trained at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, with a master’s in clinical epidemiology from Penn. Practices within a SART member clinic, where cycle outcomes are reported annually to SART and the CDC.

Suitable For

PCOS patients, especially those who hyper-responded to stimulation elsewhere or who carry insulin resistance and weight concerns alongside infertility.

Anyone whose last cycle went wrong at the dose level — too few mature eggs, too many follicles, a cancelled trigger.

Patients with two or more losses who want the endocrine work taken seriously.

Women with low ovarian reserve or premature ovarian insufficiency, including those still deciding whether to bank eggs.

Endometriosis, tubal and uterine factor infertility, where surgery, stimulation and transfer timing have to be sequenced.

Quality-motivated patients comparing clinics on process and safety, not only on published rates.