Employee benefit consulting and personal lines insurance firm Crowne/CareHere is expanding its sleep apnea pilot program at on-site health clinics across Florida to seven sites, all of which will use CleveMed home sleep tests. On-site healthcare clinics are playing an important role in controlling employers’ healthcare costs and improve employee productivity. But they have typically focused on other chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Home sleep testing (HST) allows on-site clinics to diagnose patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in the comfort of their patients’ homes.
“Expanding our scope of service with OSA diagnosis allows us to improve employees’ health by conveniently detecting a serious chronic condition that affects nearly 1 in 5 adults,” says Brian Lemay, director of implementation and clinical/quality management at Crowne/CareHere, in a release. “As importantly, prior studies have shown that due to the link between OSA, diabetes, and cardiac disease, OSA therapy can in fact translate to significant overall healthcare cost reduction (>20%) to employers in the area of cost avoidance.”
Kirk Scovill, national sales director at CleveMed, says, “Crowne/CareHere medical staff has done a tremendous job screening for high risk patients, demonstrated by a greater than 95% detection for OSA with a home sleep study. Combined with a high patient satisfaction rate due to the ease of use of SleepView, we look forward to duplicating this experience to more sites in the very near future.”
Numerous studies link OSA to major chronic diseases such as stroke, heart failure, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and increased odds of serious car crash injuries.
