Fifteen Patients Who Can Be Helped by Medicare: Insurance Policy Changes in the Coverage of CPAP Therapy for Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

Insurance coverage policies define the diagnostic criteria and adherence requirements for patients to qualify for initial and ongoing therapy with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment, the most complete therapy for obstructive sleep apnea. Unfortunately, a number of patients who use CPAP and benefit from treatment fail to meet these requirements. We present 15 patients who fail to meet Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) criteria, highlighting policies that do not support patient care.

Flow limitation/obstruction with recovery breath (FLOW) event for improved scoring of mild obstructive sleep apnea without electroencephalography.

Objective: Apnea/hypopnea index (AHI), especially without arousal criteria, does not adequately risk stratify patients with mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). We describe and test scoring reliability of an event, Flow Limitation/Obstruction With recovery breath (FLOW), representing obstructive airflow disruptions using only pressure transducer and snore signals available without electroencephalography.

Methods: The following process was used (i) Development of FLOW event definition, (ii) Training period and definition refinement, and (iii) Reliability testing on 10 100-epoch polysomnography (PSG) samples and two 100-sample tests.

Treatment of sleep-disordered breathing with positive airway pressure devices: technology update.

Many types of positive airway pressure (PAP) devices are used to treat sleep-disordered breathing including obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea, and sleep-related hypoventilation. These include continuous PAP, autoadjusting CPAP, bilevel PAP, adaptive servoventilation, and volume-assured pressure support. Noninvasive PAP has significant leak by design, which these devices adjust for in different manners.