Empowering Dental Practitioners with AI to Expedite the Sleep Apnea Diagnosis to Therapy Pipeline

Innovative AI and study management tools enhance your ability to impact community health while improving the bottom line of your practice

by Steven Miller

Imagine you stop breathing throughout the night, multiple times, for periods of time that stretch out to full minutes, and this happens every single night. That’s sleep apnea, and it affects millions of people worldwide. Despite its high prevalence – estimated globally at 22.6% – sleep apnea goes undiagnosed nearly 80% of the time.

Once diagnosed, the gold standard treatment is CPAP, with dental practices often getting more involved when patients are trying oral appliance therapy (OAT). Until recently, monitoring for patient compliance was largely an arduous, manual process. But now, a new wave of technology-focused tools is giving organizations the ability to better manage patients and improve patient outcomes and the bottom line of their practice.

Expedited Patient Diagnosis and Reporting with EnsoSleep PPG Home Sleep Testing

Testing backlogs for OSA are lengthy, so the ability to expand home sleep testing with novel solutions – like EnsoData’s FDA-cleared EnsoSleep PPG AI diagnostic algorithm – is crucial to improving patient care. EnsoSleep PPG leverages data collected from pulse ox devices and provides a determination of the AHI on single-channel photoplethysmography (PPG). And this matters, because pulse oximeters are becoming one of the most ubiquitously deployed devices across healthcare settings for diagnostic testing, bedside monitors, and consumer wearables.

Pulse oximeters can be as simple to wear as a ring, like the BodiMetrics Circul, or watch, like the Nonin WristOx2® Model 3150, and record physiological data related to sleep and breathing, including the photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal, pulse, and oxygen saturation levels. EnsoSleep PPG uses AI to analyze these data points and outputs a number of important metrics, including but not limited to eAHI, heart rate variability (HRV), flow and effort signals, sleep efficiency (SE), sleep latency (SL), and wake after sleep onset (WASO).

Simplifying Patient Management with Sleepifi Dental, Sleepifi Dream

In order to treat patients, clinicians need a simple, easy way to manage patients who might fit into the dental sleep medicine pathway. New options like VirtuOx’s Sleepifi Dental platform help dentists easily manage every step of the dental sleep medicine workflow, from patient screening and diagnosis, through the patient journey to treatment selection, prescription management, and ultimately billing documentation.

The Sleepifi Dental platform offers custom workflows and patient e-communications, while also providing automated titration testing, reducing the time a patient spends struggling with their device while also alleviating dental staff burden

How else does it provide this support to clinicians? Patient testing and diagnosis is accomplished with the new Sleepifi Dream home sleep test. The wrist-based Dream device uses high-resolution pulse oximetry and EnsoSleep PPG AI analysis to identify sleep stages and detect sleep-disordered breathing events.

As Jon Fedele, a founder at VirtuOx, noted in Sleep Review: “VirtuOx is thrilled to collaborate with EnsoData on the Dream project. Their AI-driven analysis software is highly regarded within the sleep community.”

The combination of AI and innovative platforms designed with ease-of-use in mind allow dental clinicians and practices a seamless way to deploy affordable, accessible screening and diagnostic support for OSA, improving patient health outcomes and increasing the bottom line.

A Win-Win for Dental Practices and Patients

Adopting pulse oximetry home sleep testing with Sleepifi Dream, EnsoSleep PPG AI, and Sleepifi Dental can revolutionize sleep apnea diagnosis in dental practices boosting therapy patient outcomes, and practice revenue. This integration enables dental practices to play a key role in addressing sleep apnea, benefiting both patients and the practice.