This article was republished from Albuquerque Business First with permission from the American City Business Journals. All rights reserved. For more information on this or any other American City Business Journals publication, please visit bizjournals.com
By May Ortega – Reporter, Albuquerque Business First
After establishing their own fertility-focused practice in July 2016, Albuquerque Drs. Lee and Kelly Caperton have opened a new location. With more space, the owners say, will come more jobs.
The Albuquerque-based Caperton Fertility Institute now has two locations, including one that opened in El Paso last month. Tack onto that the institute’s recently earned CAP Accreditation – short for the College of American Pathologists – and Lee Caperton would say things are going pretty well.
“We are expanding pretty rapidly here in New Mexico and our business is growing rapidly,” he said. “We’re starting to recruit a larger number of patients from outside our community, outside our state and even outside the United States.”
He declined to disclose how many patients the practice serves.
The Dallas native said the small institute is the only CAP-Accredited practice in New Mexico that has a board-certified fertility specialist.
“I think it’s another example of our continued commitment to excellence,” he said about the accreditation. “It’s just one of the other steps we’ve taken here in order to ensure New Mexicans have the most elite care that’s available.”
The institute’s Albuquerque location is at 6500 Jefferson St. and the new El Paso facility is at 1600 Medical Center. The spaces, according to Lee Caperton, measure around 6,000 square feet and 2,500 square feet, respectively.
El Paso marks the institute’s second location, but Caperton said he hopes to grow to five within as many years. Grand View Research, a San Francisco-based market research and consulting firm, said the in vitro fertilization industry was valued at more than $9 billion in 2014 and estimates it will grow to $27 billion by 2022.
Caperton said he and his co-owner Kelly saw a chance to help more people in the El Paso area.
“We saw an opportunity in El Paso that allows us to care for both the patients in southern New Mexico and also in west Texas,” he said. “It’s an underserved community from the standpoint of infertility treatment.”
He said the new facility features some technology that may not be available in that area, like a clean room-designed laboratory, which helps eliminate contaminants from the air so embryo cultures are in a more controlled environment.
Those tools are one factor in the company’s growth, Caperton said. He also attributed it to word of mouth and to being what he said was the only practice in the state with female providers.
While there are about 20 people working with the company, he said that number will rise.
“We actually have ads for providers out right now, for embryologists, for a medical technician and for ultrasonographers,” he said, adding the practice has hired several more people in the last six months.
As for finding that talent, he said it has been a pretty smooth process.
“I think possibly because we have a reputation of having a positive culture and really doing something that is valuable to humans, that we have not found it very difficult to find employees in our area,” he said.