Sleep Strategies

We are thrilled to announce that Natalie Morin, President & CEO of Sleep Strategies Inc. has been named in PROFIT magazine’s W100 ranking of Top Women Entrepreneurs. Ranking PROFIT magazine’s Top Female Entrepreneurs on a composite score based on the size, growth rate and profitability of their businesses, the PROFIT W100 profiles the country’s most successful female business owners.

A behind the scenes look at how sleep scoring services aim to form seamless partnerships with clients

The use of sleep scoring services has gained tremendous momentum as more and more hospitals and sleep labs change their internal operations to incorporate this progressive business practice. Over the course of the last decade the process of scoring sleep studies in-house has increasingly moved out of the laboratory and into the hands of specialized scoring service companies. This reflects not just a desire to cut costs, but a recognition of the value that a third party can provide as part of a strategic concentration of sleep laboratory resources. To read more visit: http://www.sleepdt.com/virtual-extension-of-your-sleep-laboratory/

Ways to diminish scoring discrepancies

No one is immune to oversights. Even well-intentioned people are subject to human errors, mix-ups, and omissions. What must be differentiated are the unavoidable, isolated incidents from systematic causes. Since scoring sleep studies is one of the most important tasks for accurate patient diagnosis, every effort should be made to prevent discrepancies. However, the current health care landscape is having an adverse impact on this indispensable skill of sleep medicine.

For example, reimbursement rates for sleep testing have been reduced, which could result in a decrease of profits for sleep labs. In turn, this could force labs to look for ways to offset their lost revenues. A common solution is to cut labor costs or skim back on resources, which inadvertently leads to decreased time devoted to quality standards. Furthermore, some hospitals are implementing cutbacks and hiring freezes. These factors combine to create an environment where senior technologists are overworked and must multitask with many interruptions, making sleep-scoring accuracy more difficult to attain, although its importance is by no means diminished. To read more, please visit: http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/issues/articles/2011-01_04.asp

Below is an article that was recently published in Sleep Diagnosis and Therapy on Sleep Strategies and how we are setting the standards for sleep scoring services.   

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As president and CEO of Sleep Strategies, Natalie Morin aims to bring consistent quality to the business of sleep scoring.

There was a time when sleep study scoring was only outsourced as a last-minute measure to deal with staffing shortages. But what began as a reactive business practice is now a flourishing business model that hospitals and private sleep facilities have embraced in an effort to streamline operations. In fact, several industry authorities claim this is quickly becoming the preferred method for sleep laboratories to have their sleep studies scored.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that healthcare departments are, by default, expected to find creative ways to accomplish their goals on miniscule budgets—same goes for sleep laboratories. The most viable solution is to partner with a reputable, industry-recognized scoring service. But how do you know when the time is right to bring one on?Ask yourself:

Is your sleep facility constantly over budget?

Do you have a regular turnover of technologists?

Do you have a backlog of patient sleep studies still needing to be scored?

Are you paying overtime to techs for performing additional scoring?

Does it take more than three business days to return scored results?  

Do you have difficulty finding and hiring qualified technologists?

If “yes” is your dominant answer, then partnering with a sleep scoring service just makes sense. Consider this: streamlining is about eliminating structural costs and finding unrecognized savings. It’s also about finding smarter ways to handle repetitive tasks and getting more out of your operational budget without sacrificing patient care. A reputable sleep scoring service becomes a virtual extension of your operation—all of the additional capacity without the bulk of expanding your operation internally. A new decade calls for a smarter, leaner and more reliable approach.

Sleep Strategies will be exhibiting at the Sleep 2010 Meeting in San Antonio, Texas from June 7-9, 2010. Please stop by our Booth 1318 to explore how our scoring services can assist with increasing productivity and heightening efficieniess in your sleep facility.

Technologist shortages, budgetary restraints and administrative negligence are some of the leading causes for sleep lab inefficiency. Below are several questions that can shed light on whether your sleep lab is being the best it can be.

Are any of your sleep studies scored by unregistered technologists?                                                

Registered techs are trained to score at peak efficiency and accuracy. 

Does it take longer than 3 business days for your lab to score patient studies?                                          

If it does, something probably isn’t working right.  

Does your lab do monthly audit and inter-rater reliability tests on the scoring of ALL techs?                    

It’s hard to know where you can improve if you don’t know where the problems are.  

Do you have a wait time of over 1 month?

You shouldn’t. Relieving patient backlogs can become a selling point to set you apart from other facilities.  

Do you have a process to evaluate the quality of your patient’s sleep study hook-up?                   

Efficiency is great, but the quality and accuracy of tests must be made a priority.

Do you have a growing backlog of patient studies that need to be scored?                                       

There’s a way to make it disappears forever.  

If you answered yes to any of these questions, your lab is not alone. Productivity issues can threaten the reputation of your sleep lab and possibly even the health of your patients. Aligning yourself with a third-party, professional scoring company can not only increase lab efficiency but improve patient care. 

When evaluating ways to cut costs, improve performance and generally work smarter, many of the world’s most prominent sleep laboratories are choosing to incorporate sleep scoring services.

Everyday human errors, such as forgetting or overlooking something important, misunderstandings and mix-ups happen even to people who are competent and doing their best to avoid them. Sleep technologists are not immune. Errors in the scoring of patient sleep studies are not isolated problems, but have underlying systemic causes. Just because a sleep studies is analyzed does not mean it has been scored correctly.

Whether your sleep lab is understaffed or technologists are undertrained, the scoring of sleep studies is fundamentally the most important task for diagnosing a patient correctly and must never be taken lightly. Even the most seasoned sleep techs may overlook an event or activity resulting in a patient misdiagnosis. So what can a sleep lab do to ensure that sleep studies are being scored correctly at all times?

Insist on registered technologists. Only these specially trained and BRPT tested, highly experienced professionals can aim to score accurately every-time. 

Self Audit. That is, randomly select patient files and review to ensure internal standards are being met.Routinely review technologists. Even the experts or senior scoring techs can fall into bad habits – perform peer observations to maintain scoring consistency.

Perform Inter-rater reliability testing. It employs a standard agreed upon industry-wide.

Hire a professional scoring service to ensure quality standards are never compromised and that your sleep studies are scored by industry experts and reviewed by internal quality assurance managers. 

You might never know that a sleep study has been incorrectly scored – until it’s too late. Until a patient realizes they’ve been misdiagnosed. Until a chance occurrence reveals staff inadequacies. Until you lose accreditation for not adhering to regulatory guidelines.  Ensure that your sleep facility’s quality assurance program is being practiced at all times

We are slowly seeing the sleep medicine industry rebound. The current economic downturn has affected all industries and sleep medicine was no exception. Those sleep labs that are boldly committed to savvy business decisions have been able to ride the downturn out rather unscathed. Did your sleep laboratory incorporate these business strategies?                    

• Scaling back the number of nights to avoid lay offs

• Flexible work schedules to distribute available work

• Eliminate unnecessary and redundant positions

• Review and cut business expense policies

• Look at bringing on temporary staff

• Place marketing as a priority

• Contract your sleep scoring to an external service provider

This last point—the outsourcing of sleep scoring—allows you to cut costs while preserving (if not improving) scoring accuracy. It’s a model that allows a sleep facility to pay only for services rendered—without needing to expend unnecessarily on a full-time position and incur extra costs such as employee benefits and training. Other benefits include the reallocation of staff to focus on core competencies and patient care.