Introduction
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.
Hypothesis
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.
Materials and 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.
Conclusion
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.
Keywords Sleep technologist - Quality assurance - Sleep laboratory accreditation - Technologist standardization