My name is William Dahl, and I’m a Product Manager at Somnoware, working to close the loop in sleep care. My longstanding passion is to help patients with chronic illnesses by empowering the healthcare ecosystem through improved diagnostic and treatment modalities. This passion stems from witnessing my grandmother struggle with a chronic illness for over a decade before being diagnosed, only to be left with limited treatment options and multiple comorbid conditions.
Unfortunately, stories that mirror my grandmother’s are common; 80% of patients with the most common sleep condition, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), as well as one of the rarest, narcolepsy, remain undiagnosed.1
Many people spend years with worsening health before their diagnosis and wait even longer to receive treatment; still others never receive therapy for a host of reasons.
Meanwhile, metabolic, respiratory, mental, and cardiovascular health are negatively impacted; having a high AHI (> 30 events/hour) is a significant predictor of all-cause mortality and untreated sleep apnea is estimated to cost Americans over $65B per year in health and productivity losses.1,2 The good news is that by collaborating with companies like Somnoware, providers can make significant headway to helping 92% of the patients whose OSA is currently unmanaged.1 Somnoware offers value to the medical community in three key ways:
- Accelerating Diagnosis: Somnoware’s original flagship platform—a diagnostic workflow service that centralizes and streamlines all sleep center operations in the cloud—effectively reduces time to diagnosis by 71%. Moving forward, we are developing advanced diagnostic and screening models that will enable prediction of sleep conditions at an early stage, thereby allowing for interventions before complications develop.
- Increasing Therapy Adherence: As more patients are diagnosed and at earlier stages, the demand for care and resources grows. Somnoware has recently launched a Care Management Module that integrates care from end-to-end and provides unprecedented visibility and intervention capacity to assist patients with sleep apnea in meeting their therapy goals. Automated interventions, contextual alerts, and predictive outcomes— combined with a robust patient history that includes comorbid conditions via HL7 and associated integrations—will enable providers to personalize and prioritize care to patients holistically, in accordance with needs and risks at the individual and population levels.
- Improving Outcomes: Within the medical community and our society at large, there is an increasing awareness and appreciation of the role of Sleep in both acute illness and long-term health. At Somnoware, we believe that treating sleep-related conditions is an integral component in improving outcomes and even in helping to prevent comorbid conditions, such as diabetes mellitus, COPD, CHF, and obesity.
Ultimately, I have joined Somnoware to further the Triple-Aim approach—creating a “Win-Win-Win” for Patients, Providers, and Payers, in which individual care and population outcomes are optimized—all while reducing costs. I invite you to reach out to us to learn more about what Somnoware can do for you, your organization, and your patients.
To learn how Somnoware helps facilities automate their testing processes, obtain predictive insights, and drive greater patient engagement, please select this link.
1. The Price of Fatigue: Harvard University https://sleep.med.harvard.edu/what-we-do/public-policy-research
2. Diagnosis and Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)