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

For hospital-side cooperation related to sleep health monitoring, the first choice is to connect with the sleep medicine center set up independently by the hospital. Hospitals without independent sleep centers will give priority to respiratory medicine and neurology departments. Based on specific business scenarios, they can also connect with physical examination centers, geriatric medicine, otolaryngology and even pediatric care. There is no absolutely fixed path for docking.

When I was running hospital-side business in the Jiangsu and Shanghai regions in the past two years, the first ones I screened were tertiary-level hospitals with independent sleep centers. These departments themselves routinely carry out polysomnography (PSG) business. Whether they are doing clinical verification of consumer-level monitoring equipment, connecting continuous monitoring tools for out-of-hospital follow-up, or building referral pathways for patients with sleep disorders, they are directly responsible for the business. The matching of needs is particularly high and the communication cost is low. Last year, we negotiated with a tertiary-level sleep center in Shanghai to collaborate on out-of-hospital snoring screening. It only took less than a month from the first meeting to the implementation of the pilot project. This was because they were worried about too many outpatients and had to wait more than a month for in-hospital PSG. They just needed portable monitoring equipment to divert patients, and we hit it off immediately.

Of course, not all hospitals have independent sleep centers. Many prefecture-level hospitals and even some provincial-level tertiary hospitals have sleep monitoring services affiliated with clinical departments, most of which are placed in the Department of Respiratory Medicine. After all, obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) is the sleep disorder with the highest proportion, and is itself the scope of diagnosis and treatment of the Respiratory Department. A small number of them are placed in the Department of Neurology, focusing on sleep problems related to neural regulation such as insomnia and narcolepsy. Before going, you can search the hospital’s official registration platform to see which department the sleep monitoring appointment number is listed in, which can save you a lot of unnecessary mistakes.

If the sleep monitoring product you make is originally intended for screening healthy people, there is no need to stick to clinical departments. I used to know an entrepreneur who made portable sleep monitoring equipment. At first, he went to the respiratory department every day and was rejected. Then he turned to a local top three physical examination center and added sleep monitoring to the physical examination package of more than 1,000 yuan. In the first month, more than 300 reports were issued, and the volume was much faster than that of clinical departments. If the focus is on sleep health management for the elderly, it will be more convenient to connect with the geriatric medicine department. More than 70% of their inpatient and follow-up patients have sleep problems to varying degrees. The department itself is also piloting full-cycle health management for the elderly, so the fit is very high. If you want to do sleep monitoring for children, the right solution is to first seek care from the pediatric care department or the pediatric respiratory subspecialty team.

There are now two different ideas for cooperation in the industry. Many people advocate skipping specific departments and directly approaching the medical department to discuss hospital-wide cooperation, saying that this way they can get the resources of the entire hospital without having to go to each department. This method is not impossible, but it is more suitable for teams that already have mature hospital-side cooperation cases and have strong product qualifications. The hospital-wide cooperation approval process is long and has many requirements. If it is a small team just starting out, and the product has not been clinically verified, it is easy to get stuck in the approval process for more than half a year. It is better to go through the pilot in a single department first, and then push it forward with actual data.

In fact, finding a matching department is just like finding a cooperative partner. There is no absolute good or bad, only the difference between suitability and suitability. It is better to first understand your product positioning and cooperation requirements before taking action. It is much better than running around and getting lucky.