Humana is the latest major insurer to partner with digital sleep clinic Dreem Health to improve members' sleep care.
California-based Dreem Health was acquired by sleep diagnostics company Sunrise in December. The company already has partnerships with the country’s largest payers including Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, HealthNet, UnitedHealthcare and Medicare.
Sunrise was built on the back of research conducted by Jean-Benoit Martinot, M.D., the father of Sunrise CEO and founder Laurent Martinot. The company developed a small device that patients are able to use to diagnose sleep disorders from anywhere—without the inconvenience of spending the night hooked up to wires in a lab—while still providing a near-similar level of information.
“Our dream today is to become the largest sleep clinic in the country,” said Laurent Martinot in an interview with Fierce Healthcare. “We already have the largest virtual care sleep clinic. We would like to become the No. 1 one place you go if you feel you are not sleeping well and you need some care.”
The Sunrise device is a diagnostic tool that is able to measure jaw movements, muscle contractions and snoring noises (through a built-in mic) from the comfort of a patient’s own bed. It’s disposable and is able to record data for up to three nights. A report is generated after just one night of sleep, allowing a care team to engage and start next steps immediately.
A rechargeable version, expected to go to market soon pending Food and Drug Administration approval, would allow the device to be utilized an infinite number of times.
“One of the big challenges in sleep care is following patients in the long run because your sleep changes over time, so being able to adapt the modality of the treatment is really key,” he said.
Nearly everyone believes in the importance of sleep, but 3 in 4 people say they get less than eight hours a night, a survey (PDF) conducted by polling firm Wakefield Research and Sunrise found.
More than half of people said they wake up feeling rested only occasionally at best. Women, young people and people with lower incomes are more likely to report inadequate sleeping patterns. In March, Dreem Health rolled out a new women’s health program for people experiencing issues related to pregnancy or menopause, for example.
A major goal of Sunrise is not only to improve sleep condition detection nationwide, but also to increase access to sleep physicians. In the U.S., there’s a only one sleep doctor for every 43,000 people, the company says. This is roughly equivalent to one sleep doctor per a sold out Citi Field, home of the New York Mets baseball team.
The American Medical Association has estimated 30 million Americans have sleep apnea. Undiagnosed sleep apnea can lead to hypertension and prediabetes, explained William Lu, M.D., medical director at Dreem Health.
“Sleep disturbances aren’t just nuisances, they’re real medical conditions with serious consequences,” said Lu.
Despite tech companies offering people more access to sleep data than ever before, sleep quality is not improving for many people. Technology should be paired with appropriate care, said Laurent Martinot, and insurer buy-in is critical to ultimately reduce long-term healthcare costs.
“That's where the relationship with the payers becomes very important, and down the road, we would like to build with them models where we are both incentivizing the outcomes,” he said.
Sunrise intends on beginning new partnerships with smaller, regional payers this year through 2027.