Why I Opened a Home Sleep Test-Only Private Practice

For telemedicine patients, he often uses mail-order services, including CleveMed’s SleepView Direct, which allow tests to be delivered directly to patients.

Jain uses CleveMed’s SleepView Direct most often for patients who live an hour or more away from the office. “We are able to care for our patients regardless of whether someone is coming in to see us face to face or lives several hours away and prefers to see us from their home,” he says.

A private practice has also given him the flexibility to be his own boss, manage his workflow, and cut down on the administrative paperwork he would often see in a major hospital system.

“I would say there are a lot of things that we do much more efficiently in my 2-person office than what we did in the hospital with ten times the staff,” he says.

Jain first started working as a sleep medicine physician about nine years ago after completing medical school at Ross University, a residency in family medicine at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and then a fellowship in sleep medicine at Stanford University. When he first started out as a sleep specialist, opening a private practice seemed out of reach.

“I used to think that hospitals were the only way to go because of the overhead involved in polysomnography. That was probably a barrier for entry for me to opening up my own sleep clinic in the past: I thought that in addition to a sleep clinic you have to have a sleep lab. If you have a sleep lab, you have to have space, you have to have staff, you have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment,” he says.

So far, he has done most of the marketing of his business himself, designing and launching a WordPress website (though he contracted a design firm to create his private practice’s logo). His only employee is his wife, Reema, who works as the practice manager and physician liaison.

To get the word out, he and his wife often drive together to local physicians’ offices to introduce his practice, shake hands, and try to gain referrals.

“Any way that we can get the word out, we’ve been trying to do so. Whenever there is downtime, we are trying to market and build up our business and let other docs know what we do,” he says.

In the Dallas area, he has found a large number of other small private practices that are willing to band together to support one another, which has helped with generating referrals, he says.

Additionally, if a complex patient needs a PSG, he has privileges at several sleep labs and can coordinate their studies there.

Since many of his patients are on positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy, he is now in the process of creating a system for all PAP compliance data to automatically flow directly into his patient’s electronic medical records. The ability to streamline and digitize workflows and patient records is a huge benefit over working in hospital systems, Jain says.

Another example of this is how Dream Sleep Medicine patients are prompted to submit their medical history and other associated forms online before they even come into the office.

Communication with patients is also more direct. Jain fields calls and online correspondence directly from his cell phone via health care communication company Spruce Health without even having to come into the office. He can also use the technology to conduct live telemedicine video visits.

So far, the transition to private practice is going well and any apprehension Jain once had has receded. “Business is picking up and we are continuing to see growth month by month in our practice,” he says.

“I think there is a lot of fear in opening a private practice, but once you actually do it, it is not as scary as it seems,” he says. “There are certainly challenges and there are certainly headaches that you don’t get when working for a hospital, but at the same time, it has been very refreshing and extremely rewarding to have my own private practice.”

Lisa Spear is the associate editor of Sleep Review.

References

1. Walia R, Achilefu A, Crawford S, et al. Are at-home sleep studies performed using portable monitors (PMs) as effective at diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in adults as sleep laboratory-based polysomnography (PSG)? J Okla State Med Assoc. 2014 Dec;107(12) 642-4.
2. Sleep Review-Needham & Company, LLC Q3 2019 Survey. Data on file.