Friday, May 08, 2009

Qualifications for Medical Directorship of a sleep center

A reader asks:
Can a Pulmonologist who is not board certified in sleep be a treating physician for the sleep center? I know the Medical Director and supervising physician has to board certified in sleep medicine.

Any specialty can be a treating physician.  According to the AASM, The medical director has to be board certified or board eligible in sleep medicine, unless there is a separate "board-certified (or eligible) sleep specialist" who does the quality control/interreliability scoring. 
Per AASM standards, if the doctor who interprets a sleep study isn't bc/be in sleep medicine, it must be overread by a doctor who is.

At the Hancock medical center sleep lab (a hospital-associated sleep lab), there is a general internist who is the medical director; I am the board certified sleep specialist and do all the sleep study interpretations.

For IDTF's each Medicare carrier has it's own standards of who can be medical director; some require that you be a pulmonologist or sleep specialist.

Some insurance companies have standards about which specialty can bill for a sleep study interpretation.

The AASM defines board eligibility in sleep medicine as having been accepted to sit for the sleep board examinations, your eligibility lasts for 2 examination cycles.  There are also special BE standards for newly graduated fellows.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In Buy Viagra labs many review told that is better to see a doctor specialized in what you have because if someone else treats you thinking something different, you may get kill...

Anonymous said...

According to international finance group, agriculture is a major source of livelihood throughout the world, especially for the majority of poor people living in rural areas in developing countries. A key challenge for the majority of these farmers is access to finance. Lack of access to finance is a key impediment to farmers in improving the efficiency of their productions and adopting better technologies. So that, to have a better understanding about the agricultural finance is a very important things to the farmers or others people that may related to it in the daily life. So that, after reading this artikel, we may have the understanding about the financial concepts and the practical applications of finance that is essential for anyone, especially the important managerial problems in agriculture that involve finance.Contact  pedroloanss@gmail.com for agricultural loans and other kind of loans at the rate of 2%.