Moving toward standardization: physician reporting of sleep studies.

Detailed primary data collected from sleep studies should lead to specific and clear reports with evidence-based clinical recommendations that, when introduced by sleep medicine specialists, create a window of opportunity to support our non-sleep medicine referring teams and to engage patients and caregivers in their care as recipients of the reports. This is how sleep study reporting differs from other test reports; currently, there is wide variation in how the data collected are presented and summarized. The goal of this document is to offer recommendations for structured reporting of sleep studies. We offer a practical, complete, and relevant document and a structure that can be implemented across sleep centers nationwide and does not burden the interpreter. We anticipate some readers will opine that some of the content is beyond the scope of what the interpreter physician needs to include, while others will propose missing data that they feel should have been included. We feel that the flexibility of the proposal accommodates for this and allows for a "first step" toward standardization of physician reporting of sleep studies. High-quality structured reporting of sleep studies is becoming ever more important for patient care, benefiting patients, caregivers, clinicians, durable medical equipment companies, and payers. CITATION: Lastra AC, Ingram D, Park J, et al. Moving toward standardization: physician reporting of sleep studies. J Clin Sleep Med. 2023;19(3):595-603.

Eliminating Sleep Health Disparities and Achieving Health Equity: Seven Areas for Action in the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Community.

Racial and ethnically minoritized and under-resourced populations do not reap the same benefits of sufficient sleep as their white counterparts resulting in insufficient sleep and sleep health disparities. Research exploring these disparities have documented a plethora of factors including social determinants of health, community violence, and structural issues - all of which are associated with adverse sleep. There are robust evidence base behavioral intervention that can be leveraged to improve sleep health among racial and ethnic groups. However, EBIs are not well leveraged. In 2021, with participation from members of the society of behavioral sleep medicine, we conducted this report to bring together the field of behavioral sleep medicine including researchers, clinicians and trainees to discuss gaps and opportunities at the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, and sleep health. The goals were anchored around seven recommendations toward reducing disparities in the near-term and longer-term approaches to eliminating disparities. Furthermore, we acknowledge that reducing and eliminating disparities in sleep health requires a multifaceted approach that includes a focus on individual, community, health care and societal levels of influence with participation from diverse partners including federal, state and local.