WatchPAT ONE and NightOwl ease cross-contamination worries and offer almost-immediate sleep apnea testing results. But they aren’t for everyone.
Excerpt from Sleep Review Magazine published on Jan 4, 2021
Although home sleep testing (HST) has been available to patients for some time, a new category of fully disposable HST devices is now changing the landscape for providers and patients alike. Whereas patients have had to return the diagnostic base unit, they can now simply discard the entire device after receiving almost-immediate results—but this newfound agility comes with some costs.
One, quite literally, is the financial cost. “Electronic devices that are used many times are inherently less expensive on a per usage basis than those used once because the cost of the device is spread over many uses. Given the declining reimbursement, the per-study cost is a serious consideration,” says Hani Kayyali, president and CEO of sleep diagnostics company CleveMed. “The solution must be affordable; otherwise, the equipment will not be used.”
Other stakeholders also note the environmental impact. “The number of fully disposable electronic devices that will have to be tossed away needlessly can be in the hundreds of thousands every year, which adds to the waste problem that many are trying to avoid,” says CleveMed’s Kayyali…