Expand Your Catchment Area with Outsourced Home Sleep Testing Services
Have you considered diagnosing and managing sleep apnea patients who live hours away by letting an HST vendor handle some of the work?
Excerpt from Sleep Review Magazine published on Aug 7, 2020
Assigning certain aspects of your home sleep testing (HST) program to a vendor with logistical expertise makes sense in some scenarios. After all, ensuring that the needed single-use items accompany the device and navigating the back-and-forth of the HST and its data can become an inefficient use of resources. During the pandemic in particular, outsourced mail-order HST has become a lifeline for patients and providers.
Some sleep care providers are finding that outsourcing HST logistics—which can include everything from mailing devices, patient education, on up to scoring and analysis—can have benefits beyond increased efficiency. They are using mail-order HST to grow their patient bases beyond their facility’s geographic area—diagnosing and treating people with sleep apnea they could not have reached otherwise.
“Reaching out to underserved populations, like rural areas, is clearly is a worthwhile pursuit,” says Hani Kayyali, CEO at CleveMed, which offers the SleepView Direct mail-order program. “Reaching out to affluent areas with high insurance coverage to increase revenue is another reason to expand a sleep center’s reach.
“Another important reason is to prevent ‘patient leakage’ to national HSAT [home sleep apnea testing] providers who have been quite successful in targeting thousands of referring sources, often in the immediate vicinity of sleep centers, resulting in business leakage away from health systems. All these factors make the expansion not only worthwhile but a necessity; one can argue that such expansion effort is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but ‘have-to-have’ to remain competitive in the future.”