Sleep Technology

This year, AAST is offering a CCSH workshop on Sept. 8 before the 2019 Annual Conference. This program is designed for advanced level health professionals and educators who work directly with sleep medicine patients, families and practitioners to coordinate and manage patient care, improve outcomes and educate the community of the importance of good sleep health. At the end of this workshop, and upon completion of an online exam, RPSGT credential holders who have recertified at least once will quality to sit for the CCSH credential examination through BRPT’s newly created pathway.

Lean manufacturing originated in Japan, where Toyota developed the Toyota Production System as a way to organize its manufacturing and logistics. Since then, many other organizations have adopted the Toyota Way, including sleep centers. While those who work in sleep centers aren’t making cars, the concepts are applicable and useful.

Dr. Frank Scheer is a professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also the keynote speaker for AAST’s 2019 Annual Meeting. Specializing in the difference between day/night rhythms and endogenous circadian rhythms, Scheer is interested in how the circadian system can influence things like energy balance and cardiovascular risk factors.

For a child, a sleep schedule is everything.

Daniel Erichsen, MD, saw it time and time again. Patients would come into his sleep clinic in Oregon complaining of insomnia, and he would tell them the same thing: If you don’t try to sleep, eventually you will. But they weren’t always listening. “I got frustrated with just saying the same thing over and over,” Erichsen says. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way I can communicate with a lot of people at once.’”

Credentials are a great thing to have. Not only do they signal to others what kind of specializations you have, they also display how hard you’ve worked in your career. It's commonplace for people to include their credentials on a variety of things — email signatures, business cards, name placards — but are you displaying them correctly?

Technology has allowed us to link with people all around the world. From connecting with friends and family abroad to discovering new cultures while sitting in the comfort of our own home, access to the internet has transformed the way we communicate.

Picture it: Just as you’re laying your head down to sleep, you hear a sudden loud noise. It’s frightening and powerful — and it’s all in your head.

Technology has made our lives a lot easier in many ways, but it has complicated it in others, too. Especially when it comes to your security. As humans increasingly rely on apps and devices, more and more of our data is being stored on various platforms. That includes the devices we use to track our sleep. Any data we hand over to a device is typically stored on a server in the cloud. And sometimes that data can be compromised. But should we be concerned about our privacy when it comes to sleep data? D. Reed Freeman Jr., a leading authority on privacy and cybersecurity, says the answer isn’t so black and white.

Patients drinking alcohol is not something that would normally happen before a medical visit. But in sleep medicine, sometimes it might be the key to getting the best snapshot of a patient’s sleep ailments.