As other specialties take notice of sleep, referral and intake models must update to close the loop.
By Sree Roy
Sleep physician Jordan Stern, MD, had gotten used to receiving emails from non-sleep healthcare providers politely declining integrations with his virtual sleep platform. “They would say, ‘Oh yes, this is interesting’….But they were pretty honest that they weren’t ready to do anything,” says Stern, CEO of virtual sleep apnea practice BlueSleep.
But lately: “It is finally happening,” he says. When contacting, or being contacted by, wearable and app companies, “we are finally seeing interest in partnerships to help their customers.” BlueSleep is now in bidirectional referral relationships with multiple companies in different specialties, with weight loss startup Shapely as just one example.
I am relieved to see sleep be recognized as the foundational pillar of health it has always been, not just as a niche specialty. The powerful pipelines of consumer wearables, new therapies like GLP-1s, and strides in peer-reviewed research have persuaded the medical field to integrate sleep into chronic disease management.
However, the sleep medicine subspecialty must do better in closing the loop for these sleep-aware consumers and companies. Consumers now acknowledge that better sleep could improve their heart issues, influence diet, or nudge A1C in the right direction. “But the number who actually do seek help is a small minority: 23%,” says Carlos Nunez, chief medical officer at Resmed, citing Resmed’s 2026 Global Sleep Survey.
We can’t let this opportunity to turn awareness into action pass by. As Elie Gottlieb, PhD, head of applied science at Sleep.ai, puts it: “Right now, most of these platforms treat sleep like a motivational poster on the wall of a metabolic health program. The next step is making it load-bearing.”
Doing that requires easing friction every step of the way.
For example, at virtual sleep apnea care company Ognomy, CEO Daniel Rifkin, MD, MPH, sees the challenges in converting sleep-aware consumers into actual patients. Site visitors sometimes register but do not select an appointment time, or book and then cancel their consults. “Some people don’t go through with it,” Rifkin says. Ognomy uses light-touch nudges—such as education about lesser-known symptoms like nocturia—to move users toward professional sleep care.
Similarly, pulmonologist-sleep physician Sahil Chopra, MD, has embedded his end-to-end sleep platform into many private practices, particularly in the longevity and otolaryngology spaces.“The problem is when these specialties want their patients to do a sleep study, there’s a ton of friction involved in getting the study from referral to interpretation,” says Chopra, Empower Sleep co-founder. Chopra gives these practices SleepImage rings and a hyperlink to connect with Empower Sleep—a much more seamless option.
There are many benefits of promoting the interdisciplinary growth of sleep. Foremost is the potential to improve the lives of people with sleep disorders. Right now, most people with obstructive sleep apnea remain undiagnosed. “That’s not really a clinical gap,” emphasizes Ognomy’s Rifkin. “That is truly a systemic failure.”
Now that sleep has cleared the recognition hurdle, the next step is making care truly accessible.
