Implementing portable monitoring?

[Bobblehead]

Have people here implemented a portable monitoring strategy for their lab? How many studies per night are you running? Set-up by the techs at night in the lab or in the clinic by a nurse or have the patients do it themselves? Do you monitor for just one night or would you do two nights to increase your chances of getting interpretable data?

Anyone lose a monitor and how did you deal with that? Insurance? Bill the patient (not feasible if the patient has no money for a $3-8K monitor)?

How did you get over the inertia of doing something "new" in an established lab situation?

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[neurologist]

Have people here implemented a portable monitoring strategy for their lab? How many studies per night are you running? Set-up by the techs at night in the lab or in the clinic by a nurse or have the patients do it themselves? Do you monitor for just one night or would you do two nights to increase your chances of getting interpretable data?

Anyone lose a monitor and how did you deal with that? Insurance? Bill the patient (not feasible if the patient has no money for a $3-8K monitor)?

How did you get over the inertia of doing something "new" in an established lab situation?

We are reluctantly moving that way. Have two types of equipment which we are using on occasional selected patients to get the feel for each, but not regularly using it frequently. One requires tech setup and one is set up at home by patient. We just do one night.

No equipment losses yet.

We are getting over the inertia the same way that everyone else will: by realizing that insurers won't be paying for as many attended studies in the future.

 

[neurolddoc]

We haven't started portable sleep monitoring yet but in 10 years of ambulatory EEG monitoring we have never had a unit go missing.