Medicare Advantage insurer Essence Healthcare is continuing to build out its partnership with Oura and has unveiled a new clinical program that aims to identify potential sleep apnea risk.
Essence is rolling out a new clinical workflow that will arm physicians with insights into patients' nighttime breathing habits to identify those who may be at risk for obstructive sleep apnea. The insurer offers the ring as a covered benefit through some of its plans and has been working with Oura's team to identify more clinical applications for its data.
News of the partnership expansion was shared first with Fierce Healthcare.
Through the program, insights into members' sleep, as identified by the Oura Ring, will be shared with Essence with the patients' consent. The insurer then uses Lumeris' Tom platform to reach out to at-risk individuals and guide them through STOP-BANG, a common evidence-based screening for sleep apnea.
Results of that test are shared with the members' physician, who can then decide the next best steps, such as a sleep study or other course of treatment.
Saria Saccocio, M.D., chief medical officer of Essence Healthcare, told Fierce that sleep apnea affects between 20% and 30% of adults over the age of 65, but 80% of cases are undiagnosed.
She said that being able to bring concrete data to its providers is already resonating.
"We're starting to get the feedback that it's connecting in a way that they can then communicate with the patient to start to make changes," Saccocio said.
Essence has seen significant uptake of Oura since it made the smart rings available in some of its plans. Jason Oberfest, vice president of healthcare at Oura, told Fierce that roughly a third of Essence's members have opted into using the ring.
For members who are comfortable with the device, the sleep apnea monitoring is built to be simple and proactive within the tool they already use. The ring can monitor their breathing habits overnight, and flag for Essence when it detects an unusual number of disturbances in a night.
Oberfest said that sleep overall has a significant impact on health, and sleep apnea in particular, as it strains the cardiovascular system, can drive increased risk for heart attack, stroke, arrhythmia or other adverse events. Sleep apnea is also a common comorbidity with diabetes, he said, but can actually make it harder to manage blood sugar and insulin levels.
In addition, he said that fragmented sleep can have a negative impact on memory and mental health.
"There's a lot of core patient issues at stake here," Oberfest said.
Saccocio said that addressing a condition like sleep apnea is also a clear opportunity to bring the patient, provider and payer together to tackle a problem that will genuinely improve the member's quality of life.
"When you can demonstrate that out to a PCP and to the member, it's rare that that we get this triangulation in a very positive way that drives behavior and improves health, and we're seeing it," she said. "We're literally seeing it today."