Standardization of quality assurance for sleep technologist: a model.
BACKGROUND
Since the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth of sleep centers in the US to meet the increasing need of diagnosing and treating sleep disorders. However, this unregulated growth has resulted in tremendous variance in the quality of sleep centers across the nation. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, in an attempt to provide a benchmark standard, has introduced a voluntary accreditation process, part of which involves assessment of technical quality parameters. However, measuring technical quality is not easy.


OBJECTIVE
We undertook a study to determine if the implementation of point system and schematic feedback on technologist performance can result in improvement and tracking of their performance.


METHODS
We randomly reviewed 100 charts from the preimplementation phase as control and 1,739 charts from the post implementation of the point system phase as study group.


RESULTS
There was a statistically significant difference in the score among technologist between the control and study groups with the average being 75 +/- 4.12 and 87.53 +/- 0.91, respectively, with a p value being 0.0001.


CONCLUSIONS
Evaluating the performance of the sleep technologist can be a way to track and monitor their performance in a standardized way and to identify weakness at an earlier stage. We present a system, which we have developed and implemented at our sleep center, as a possible model of assessing and subsequently standardizing technical quality for polysomnography.
Surani
Salim
S
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA. srsurani@hotmail.com
Aguillar
Raymond
R
Aguillar
Roy
R
Subramanian
Shyam
S
D002983:Clinical Competence; D006801:Humans; D017286:Polysomnography; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D012891:Sleep Apnea Syndromes / Q000175:diagnosis; D056508:Sleep Medicine Specialty / Q000592:standards*; D000078329:Workforce