Sleep Strategies

THE RIGHT WAY AND THE WRONG WAY 

To truly claim your sleep laboratory has a rigorous quality assurance system, it takes a little more than status quo. Here are a few points for your sleep laboratory to consider regarding the quality assurance of your sleep studies: 

• Insist on registered technologists. Only these specially trained and BRPT tested, highly experienced professionals can guarantee an accurate interpretation of data.

• Self Audit. Randomly select client files and review to ensure internal standards are being met on a monthly basis.

• Review technologists. Even the experts can fall into bad habits - perform peer observations to maintain scoring consistency.

• Understand the latest guidelines. AASM and HIPAA enforce a base level of service delivery.

• Hire a professional scoring service to ensure quality standards are never compromised.

 The health of your patients and the reputation of our industry depend on accuracy and integrity. There is more than one way to score a sleep study, but in reality there shouldn’t be.  

Sleep Strategies will be exhibiting at the 4th Conference of the Canadian Sleep Society on April 26-28th in Toronto, CANADA.  Please stop by Booth 100 to discuss your sleep scoring and laboratory needs.  

Natalie Morin, President & CEO of Sleep Strategies will be presenting to the delegates the New AASM Scoring Guidelines, as well as chairing a mock debate on the merits of portable monitoring.

Insurance. You have it on your car, your house, your life. You have it when you travel and you most certainly have it if you own a sleep laboratory. So why do sleep facilities that decide to hire a scoring service rarely find out whether their scoring company or freelancer has it? You need to know if they’ve included general liability and errors and omissions insurances into their scoring business – don’t just assume it’s common business practice. You might consider them an extension of your team and therefore legally bound by your own insurance, but the fact is: they are not. The law considers them a vendor – just like your linen service or IT contractor.

Most hospitals require general liability and errors and omission in order to become a scoring vendor. This is standard practice for the sleep scoring industry. Should you decide to incorporate a scoring service into your facility request a copy of the insurance certificate for your records before moving forward. Remember, selecting a reputable scoring service that practices proper business policies and procedures will ensure that your sleep facility is protected. 

1 RPSGT in India and 2 RPSGT’s in the Philippines – but who is scoring your studies?  

Whether offshore sleep scoring is good or bad has always been a hotly debated topic. Cultural consistency, quality concerns, employee turnover and communications (language) barriers are just some of the issues that might make you think twice before outsourcing offshore. The good news is: most of these hurdles can be easily addressed with a little due diligence. The question that remains: who is scoring these sleep studies? According to the BRPT, there is only one registered sleep technologist in India and four RPSGT’s in the Philippines. 

There is no denying that offshore sleep record outsourcing of patient studies can be an effective business tool. But guaranteeing quality assurance, patient confidentially and comparable standards to those set here in North American should be paramount. The only reliable way to do this is to hire registered technologists to score the studies and incorporate quality measures such as interscorer reliability and audit testing on a routine basis. RPSGT certification is more than a piece of paper. It’s a multi-layered standard and it’s in our best interest to uphold and advocate these certifications. For overseas outsourcing to have longevity scoring technologists need more than industry insurance – they have to become RPSGTs. And I don’t just mean having an RPSGT simply review a study scored by a non-registered technologist either.

So coming back to my original question: who is scoring these studies if there is only a handful of registered technologists abroad?  My guess is as good as yours. The fact is that it likely isn’t an RPSGT or an AASM physician. If saving money is at the top of your list of priorities then offshore outsourcing may be a perfect fit. Just cross your fingers and hope that the one RPSGT in India is the one scoring your studies. 

One of the industry’s leading sleep scoring companies - Sleep Strategies - walks us through the evolution of a once new industry now beginning to mature.

Third party scoring services have gained tremendous momentum over the last few years. Hospitals and private sleep facilities are turning to this business solution as a means to combat the shortage of registered technologists, manage their growth and streamline their businesses. But within its popularity, remain many unanswered questions about what the sleep scoring industry is really all about.

To help decode the lesser-known aspects of sleep scoring, Sleep Diagnosis and Therapy’s editor sat down with President & CEO Natalie Morin of Sleep Strategies - one of the industry’s first and largest leading sleep scoring companies. The result is a candid and informative glimpse at a maturing industry through the eyes of a woman who helped conceive it. Read more

Advance for Managers of Respiratory Care conducted its second annulal survey asking readers to nominate vendors they consider to be “Top of the Class” for various products and service categories. A list of winners will appear in the September issue.  To read Natalie Morin’s, president and CEO, Sleep Strategies’ acceptance letter, please click here.

A sleep diagnostic center’s success greatly depends on how quickly it can generate accurate results. As the demand for sleep testing rises, often so does the backlog of studies to score.

This presents an enticing opportunity to well-trained polysomnographic technologists interested in launching an independent company that provides sleep scoring services. However, it will take much more than a computer and an entrepreneurial spirit to get started.  Read more

Ottawa-based company Sleep Strategies is positioning itself to be a global leader in sleep analysis services, writes Kelly Roesler.

An Ottawa-based health care company is aiming to revolutionize the sleep medicine industry, helping U.S. hospitals and health facilities diagnose patients with sleep disorders.  Sleep Strategies, a business-to-business company that analyses sleep disorder tests, was createdto alleviate a “major backlog” of patient studies and address a shortage of staff and expertise in sleep medicine, according to founder and CEO Natalie Morin.  

To read the full article, please visit: Turning sleep into a winning proposition

Chad Doucette, V.P. Sales and Marketing for Sleep Strategies looks at the ever changing sleep medicine industry in the latest issue of Sleep Diagnosis and Therapy Magazine. 

To read the article, please visit  http://www.sleepdt.com/_journal/v3n3/pdf/SDT-20-21.pdf