title: Standardization of quality assurance for sleep technologist: a model.
abstract: 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.
authors: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA. srsurani@hotmail.com
authors: Salim
authors: S
authors: Surani
authors: Raymond
authors: R
authors: Aguillar
authors: Roy
authors: R
authors: Aguillar
authors: Shyam
authors: S
authors: Subramanian
mesh_terms: 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