Medical Device Daily

A newly formed company says it will focus on diagnosing sleep disorders in a group — long-haul truckers — that one might suspect of having a large number of problems in that area.

Safety Sleep Systems (SSS; Tulsa, Oklahoma) said it will focus on developing solutions for those suffering from sleep-related medical issues, with an initial focus on the trucking industry.

The company's co-founders are Dr. James Duke, a polysomnologist and nationally known sleep expert with more than 30 years of diagnosis and treatment of sleep-related disorders; and Dr. Bobby Daniel, founder and owner of Oklahoma Rehab Services (Tulsa), a company that treats patients with lung disorders.

According to Bruce Keltner, CEO of Oklahoma Rehab and the newly named CEO of SSS, the issue kept coming up in conversations he had with Duke that trucking companies and their employees were particularly vulnerable to sleep disorders, not just obstructive sleep apnea, but a whole host of other inter-related problems.

"About three years ago, we started to work on equipment that would identify a lot of other medical issues," he told Medical Device Daily.

The company noted that sleep apnea and sleep-related disorders have been directly related to the majority of trucking accidents in the last few years. The company's founders believe that their system can help identify and treat these disorders to comply with new federal regulations and reduce the number of trucking accidents, and also possibly save the lives of the truck drivers themselves.

"Because drivers are frequently not properly diagnosed, or find traditional treatments too costly and inconvenient, their sleep apnea frequently goes untreated," said Duke. "The development of new cost-effective medical protocols, combined with efficient new technology, is key to making significant inroads to treatment and improving driver safety."

Keltner said the company's system is different from the simple monitoring systems found in hospitals that monitor patients and diagnose sleep apnea. "It's a total management system."

By doing this, he said the company diagnoses underlying issues that may be making a patient sleepy — such as high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular problems, all serious issues.

The company said that recent industry and government research suggests that the more than 8 million commercial motor vehicle (CMV) operators have a higher prevalence of sleep apnea than the general population and may be three times more likely to have driving accidents. This has, in turn, resulted in changes to U.S. federal statutes.

Some states now require CMV drivers to undergo medical qualification examinations at least every two years.

SSS has developed a system that allows these patients to be diagnosed from a remote location, such as in their own home. The equipment is able to transmit the data to a data center via a satellite hook-up.

By doing the diagnosis outside the hospital, Keltner said that the company is able to save the trucking companies substantial amounts of money. As an example, he noted that one trucking company based out of Marshfield, Wisconsin, would have to pay $8,000 to have a sleep study done in the local hospital for one of its drivers.

"We can do the test for $650 because it's ambulatory and done by satellite, he said."

He also noted that his company can turn around the results much faster than a hospital can — two to three days vs. 10 to 12 days for a hospital.

As part of its "total management" claims, SSS also takes its care of patients much further than a traditional hospital would.

"The only thing hospitals are going to do is tell a DME [durable medical equipment] company to put a CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] on them. We take it much further than that; we monitor that CPAP via satellite, and we can adjust the pressures remotely to get more oxygen down in the person's lungs which is the problem."

The company is also able to detect other serious issues that may be related to and perhaps more serious than sleep apnea and recommend a course of treatment or a referral to, say, a cardiologist.

"Let's save these peoples' lives and let's save the insurance companies $3.4 million, which is the average truck accident settlement resultant from a sleeping disorder."

Duke told MDD that the company also envisions using the remote diagnosis system outside of the trucking industry for patients in rural and urban settings and to diagnose and help treat the more than 80 other sleep disorders aside from sleep apnea that are generally not being looked at in sleep labs.