Which hospital department should we discuss cooperation with for sleep health monitoring

Priority will be given to the independent sleep medicine center (sleep department) of the hospital. If not, the neurology department, respiratory medicine department, otolaryngology department, geriatric medicine department, and health management center are also potential cooperation ports according to the direction of cooperation.

In the past two years, I helped a friend who did wearable sleep monitoring work with hospitals in East China. The first one I connected with was an independent sleep center in a tertiary-level hospital in Hangzhou. At that time, the director was worried that he could not keep track of the hundreds of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients who were recovering at home. Each follow-up visit relied on the patient's verbal description, and he was not sure whether he was wearing a ventilator as required, or his blood oxygenation during sleep. The equipment we brought happened to be able to monitor sleep data for seven consecutive days at home, and it could also be synchronized directly to the hospital's HIS system. It could even divert users who initially screened positive on the platform to the department for diagnosis. After sitting down and chatting for less than half an hour, we decided to put 10 devices in for a three-month pilot.

Don’t panic if the hospital you go to does not have a separate sleep department. Currently, only tertiary-level hospitals in China have relatively high coverage of sleep departments. Many second-level and grass-roots hospitals have sleep-related diagnosis and treatment scattered in various departments. The most common ones are the neurology and respiratory departments. After all, most sleep problems are related to central nervous system regulation or airway problems such as apnea. These two departments have the largest patient pool and the clearest needs. When discussing cooperation in a second-grade hospital in Suzhou, the director complained that many patients with chronic insomnia relied on "recall reports" for follow-up visits. Some said they had not slept all night, but actually slept intermittently for four or five hours while wearing a polygraph, which caused great interference in adjusting medication. At that time, we directly produced a report on the agreement between the equipment and the hospital's gold standard polysomnography, which was over 92%. On the same day, we decided to give 50 enrolled patients with chronic insomnia free follow-up for one month.

If your product is consumer-grade and you have not yet obtained the Class II medical device certificate, there is no need to stick to the clinical department. It will be more efficient to connect to another port. For example, if you want to sign up for a physical examination package, you can go directly to a health management (physical examination) center. A friend who made a smart sleep monitoring mattress previously cooperated with a top-tier physical examination center in Guangzhou to make sleep monitoring an optional add-on for people over 40 years old. It cost 89 yuan per order. In the first three months after it was launched, more than a thousand people chose it for physical examination. The approval process was more than half the time of entering a clinic. If your product focuses on sleep health management for the elderly, it would be better to find a department of geriatric medicine or a public health department in a community hospital. Many geriatric departments are now engaged in long-term management of comorbidities of the elderly. Sleep data is an important part of assessing health status. I previously helped the geriatric department of a community hospital in Beijing, and they were worried about the lack of dynamic data for health follow-up for the elderly in the area. They installed 20 pieces of equipment for free, and collected more than 300 pieces of valid data in half a month.

Of course, there are different voices in the industry now. Many clinicians feel that non-medical grade sleep monitoring data has large errors and can only be used as a health reference at best and cannot be included in the diagnosis and treatment process. Don’t argue when you encounter such serious doctors. You can start cooperation from scientific research topics. I met a very strict director of the respiratory department last year. At first, he said that consumer-level sleep monitoring is a "toy." Later, we asked him to conduct a controlled trial with 80 samples. Our equipment's screening sensitivity for moderate to severe OSA was 94%. As soon as the test results came out, he took the initiative to talk to us about long-term patient follow-up cooperation.

Oh, by the way, when connecting, don’t just pull out a PPT to talk about how great your product is. First, find out the current pain points of the department, whether it is a lack of patient sources, lack of follow-up data, or whether it is necessary to accumulate scientific research samples. Talk according to the needs, the success rate can be much higher.