Because of this, he adds, the patient will often have to be retested, which costs payors and the entire system money.Īpproving the Testers Going hand in glove with the new standards is a program developed by the AASM to establish a list of approved out of center sleep testing suppliers for accredited centers to potentially utilize. “A lot of programs don’t take into account comorbidities or have a regard for the age of the patient. “Out of center sleep testing isn’t really appropriate for everybody,” Fleishman says. One of the underlying themes of the new standards is clearly defining who should and who should not be tested at home. The AASM is unwavering in our message to insurers and other stakeholders that board certified sleep medicine physicians and the team at AASM accredited sleep centers are uniquely qualified to provide high quality, coordinated, and cost-effective diagnostic and therapeutic services for patients with a sleep illness such as OSA.” In a letter to AASM members earlier this year, Fleishman explains further that accreditation was more important than ever “especially as the US health care system continues to move in the direction of outcomes based medicine. While the revised standards, which take effect on August 1, 2013, may seem to be another in sleep medicine’s ongoing sea changes related to the way it conducts its business, Fleishman, who is medical director of sleep medicine and behavioral health for Cape Fear Valley Health System in Fayetteville, NC, says that the AASM is of the “general feeling that these are not major issues, they’re more administrative hurdles. “Strengthening the OCST accreditation standards in areas such as HIPAA compliance and equipment maintenance will ensure that facilities maintain the highest standards in every aspect of testing,” he says. The revised standards will help to guarantee the data continue to be the best possible. This is a major step forward to ensure consistent, high standards in OCST.”īadr, who is a professor and chief of the Pulmonary Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Department of Internal Medicine at Harper University Hospital and Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, adds that he has confidence in the data collected during OCST studies, because of advances in portable monitoring technology in the last few years. I am particularly pleased that the OCST accreditation standards require that the designated medical director must be a sleep specialist. “Specifically, the standards will guide us in selecting the right test, for the right patient, under the guidance of the right physician. “The most important aspect for me is the identification of the parameters within which these tests are appropriate,” he says. Safwan Badr, MD, all of the standards are critically important, but, for him, one is chief among them. “We wanted the standards to reflect the technology of today.”įor AASM President-elect M. We wanted to have it be tighter,” explains Samuel A. “As more data sharing is moving to the cloud, it is more important to address how it should be saved and shared. One of the key areas that the revised standards addressed is issues surrounding the sharing of patient data. Revised Standards for Today To address this, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) recently updated its Out of Center Sleep Testing (OCST) in Adult Patients accreditation standards. In fact, where it was once a controversial idea, home sleep testing has become widely accepted by patients, referring physicians, sleep medicine physicians, and payors.īut home sleep testing, or out of center sleep testing, for all of its acceptance, can present a host of issues for sleep physicians, from the handling of the equipment to the accuracy of the data to the security of patient information. Perhaps one of the biggest is the migration from testing patients for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in the lab to their homes. In its short time as a medical discipline, sleep medicine has seen several sea changes. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine takes a big step in keeping out of center sleep standards relevant and up-to-date for today’s sleep labs and patients.
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