I am hopeful that by now you have had an opportunity to read the AASM’s recent proposal for the Innovation Care Delivery and Management Program for Patients with OSA (ICDMPPO), which was submitted to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to its Health Care Innovation Challenge. We at the AASM feel that this important proposal represents the future of clinical care for adults with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

The AASM now has 10,000 members – one member for every lake in Minnesota or as many people as in the city of Aliquippa.  This is an incredible milestone for all of us.  I am told the first member was recruited in 1974 – and now we have our 10,000^th member.  The AASM is the largest membership society dedicated to sleep medicine and is still growing!  We are all acutely aware of the challenges ahead of us, but with 10,000 members and an influx of newly ABMS-certified sleep specialists, we are poised to continue to move the specialty of sleep medicine ahead.

Wow, can you believe it is 2012?!! Now how long will it take you to date things correctly? I have already messed up three times! It promises to be a very exciting year – a national election, the Olympics, our biggest SLEEP annual meeting yet, the addition of the AASM’s 10,000th member, and who knows what else. One thing is for sure, it will be full of surprises.

Happy Holidays! The AASM has been quite busy on numerous initiatives during this holiday season. We are working diligently on the proposal that the AASM will be submitting for the CMS Health Care Innovation Challenge. We also have had a Nominating Committee meeting during which a new president-elect and board member were proposed. Those names will be presented to the board of directors in January for approval. The SAD task force (Sleep Apnea Definitions) has been examining the current respiratory definitions in the scoring manual.

The AASM received an early Christmas gift this year. CMS has a process to apply for the “Health Care Innovation Challenge.” They are awarding up to $1 billion in grants for those who implement “the most compelling new ideas to deliver health, improved care and lower costs.” The AASM is up to the challenge, and we are planning to submit a modified version of our integrated care delivery model for obstructive sleep apnea. The award cycles are March 2012 and August 2012. We will submit our letter of intent by Dec. 19 and the full application by Jan. 27, 2012.

Oh what a great day Thanksgiving can be – good food, family and a good snooze during the football game! But wait, why do we celebrate Thanksgiving? Oh yeah, that Pilgrim and Native American thing. The first “American Thanksgiving” probably occurred in the 1500s in Saint Augustine, Florida; but for the Pilgrims, the official date was Dec. 13, 1621. In 1789, our first president, George Washington, decreed the first “United States” Thanksgiving Day; but it still wasn’t an official holiday. Abraham Lincoln set aside the last Thursday in November as the national day of Thanksgiving; but again, not until 1941 did Congress permanently establish the day, the fourth Thursday in November, as a national holiday.

I just returned from our fall Board of Directors meeting. In the upcoming weeks, I will be giving you information on many of the initiatives we discussed including our new Standards of Practice procedures, a new process for updating the scoring manual, the progress on the ICSD-3, our integrated management proposal, a taskforce examining advanced practice nurses and PAs, the update on respiratory events scoring, and lots more. I want to use this week’s blog to encourage you to renew your AASM membership for 2012. We are rapidly growing and hope that we will have 10,000 members before the end of next year.

I am far from a computer geek. However, I spend so much time on a computer that I have come to know my way around adequately. As president of the AASM, I am trying to understand and determine what direction we should go with in regards to the electronic medical record (EMR). As most of you are aware, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress developed a formula of incentives and penalties for EMR adoption; and, by the way, the penalties begin in 2015.

The weather is cooling, the nights are longer and the leaves are changing. So what is changing at the AASM? We are working on a process to update/revise the scoring manual. I received the draft version of the updated respiratory rules this week from the “SAD” taskforce. This now is headed to the board of directors for their perusal and input. This has prompted us to think about how we will update the scoring manual going forward...

I read with interest the recent editorial about Dr. William Dement in the journal SLEEP. As everyone in the sleep field knows, Dr. Dement is a true champion of the field and an advocate for public education. We should all strive to do the same – promote good sleep habits, discuss the importance of sleep disorders and not be ashamed or reluctant to tell people what our profession is or interests are because it is not “sexy” or “flashy.” I do not need to regale this audience with the statistics about how sleep deprivation impacts our economy, personal lives or health. Every one of us should be on our soapbox telling everyone we know about the importance of sleep.