Photo by David Stuckman

Sleep technologists ordinarily spend 1,000 to 2,000 hours per year in face-to-face contact with patients trying out PAP therapy. Often, they know sleep patients as well as if not better than other providers who care for them. When effectively trained, sleep techs can engage patients to learn about their motivations, frustrations, and anxieties about PAP therapy. They also serve as an early warning system embedded in the sleep lab to detect barriers to adaptation. Few other health care professional can match the nightly experiential interactions between sleep techs and patients, which often prove key to successful PAP therapy outcomes.

Why then has the sleep medical community abided by a system created by government, insurance carriers, and durable medical equipment companies (DMEs) in which sleep techs are restricted from helping patients to learn to use PAP therapy during the daytime? When I was researching this question during the past decade, the most frequent answers offered were that sleep techs are not:

• licensed health care professionals,
• respiratory therapists,
• eligible for reimbursement for their own services.

While these points are correct, it strikes me as a failure of imagination to have not found a way to employ the daytime skills and talents of sleep technologists to help sleep patients in their quest to adhere to PAP therapy. The only caveat I’ve discovered is that many sleep medicine physicians direct sleep techs to operate PAP clinics to assist patients—free of charge! By the way, the fact that free PAP clinics have sprung up across our country at a sizeable number of sleep medical centers informs us a great deal about the quality of services patients receive at DME home care companies.

For the rest of the article:

See http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/issues/articles/2009-10_05.asp