Optimizing the Scalability of Evidence‐Based Behavioral Sleep Medicine Practices

NOCTEM™ has begun enrolling healthcare providers and patients for their clinical effectiveness and implementation trial to evaluate a new software solution that provides personalized insomnia treatment to military service members. To support their efforts, they also held a workshop of the basic principles and practices in behavioral sleep medicine to over 80 healthcare providers at Navy Medicine West.

Insufficient sleep and insomnia affect between 40% and 70% of military service members, which compromises readiness, performance, health, productivity, and safety.Insomnia is often comorbid with other psychiatric and medical conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicidality, anxiety, alcohol use disorder, hypertension, chronic pain, obesity, and diabetes. Insomnia is a preventable and treatable condition. However, current solutions are resource-intensive and not adequately scalable for use by military service members.

NOCTEM’s new software solution aims to upskill existing providers with clinician decision support algorithms,increase their capacity to monitor service members’ sleep and compliance in real time, and deliver personalized evidence-based sleep optimization recommendations to hundreds of service members remotely. The software solution usescloud and mobile architectures to provide near-instantaneous and secure messaging between healthcare providers and service members. Data integrity is ensured through an encrypted local storage framework, allowing for offline data collection via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, the latter of which offers advantages for those operating in remote environments.Anne Germain, Founder and CEO of NOCTEM, states that “the goal is not to replace sleep doctors, but better match the sleep needs of the patients with the resources that are available.”

With support from USAMRDC’s Military Operational Medicine Research Program (MOMRP) and MTEC, NOCTEM has enrolled 17 healthcare providers with plans to enroll at least 24 providers and 576 patients.NOCTEMrecently publishedtheir design and methods for their clinical effectiveness and implementation trial in Trials. Details about the clinical trial, which is titled, Optimizing the Scalability of Evidence-Based Behavioral Sleep Medicine Practices With a Digital Health Platform, can be found online atClinicalTrials.gov.The clinical trial is led by Dr. Rachel Markwald, Head of the Sleep, Tactical Efficiency, and Endurance Laboratory and members of her team at the Naval Health Research Center’s Warfighter Performance Department. In addition to supporting the ongoing clinical trial, NOCTEM plans to pilot its turn-key solution later this year and augment current sleep services that are available to service members in areas where sleep healthcare options remain insufficient.For more information, visit NoctemHealth.com.

This project was funded through MTEC’s Tele-Sleep Decision Assist Tool Request for Proposals (Solicitation #19-02-Tele-Sleep).