Innovator Spotlight Series: Sleep Matters Initiative at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Innovator Series
The CIDH Innovator Spotlight is a Q&A series that celebrates innovative ideas, highlights the important work that digital health innovators are doing to advance patient care and outcomes at Mass General Hospital, and shares key learnings about the innovation journey.
We are pleased to feature the Sleep Matters Initiative Team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Q: Tell us about your innovation and the challenge(s) you are trying to solve. Who are the people involved?
SMI: Collecting accurate daily sleep diary data from research participants or clinic patients poses several usability, accuracy, and consistency challenges. Researchers and clinicians often lack standard practices for data collection, and sleep diary users frequently find it difficult to enter dates and times, leading to errors in sleep data.
We have developed a web-based sleep diary (eDiary) that improves data collection in several areas. It reduces participant burden, delivers clean, accurate data, and is validated. The eDiary provides intelligent data checking and real-time data visualization for feedback. An admin module provides helpful common tasks for administering and reviewing participation, compliance, and data quality.
The Sleep Matters Initiative team at BWH developed the eDiary.
Q: The innovation process can be long and challenging, but also rewarding. What inspired you to begin this journey?
SMI: We developed this tool to meet our needs since there wasn’t anything available at the time. Once we developed it, we found it incredibly useful and have continued to refine it. We think it would be useful for other groups or institutions to collect sleep and scheduling information as part of a research study or clinically. Other groups paying to use the eDiary would help offset ongoing and future development costs for us and our partners.
Q: Where are you in the innovation cycle (i.e., early-stage commercialization)?
SMI: We are in the early stage of contacting other research institutions and clinics. We hope to commercialize the eDiary by creating a SAAS offering. This would be a niche offering for a small market rather than a large commercial product.
Q: What internal resources have been most helpful to you?
SMI: We have just started the process of reaching out to other research institutions and clinics and looking for internal resources for assistance. The CIDH group has been really helpful in pointing out what is needed to develop a commercially viable offering.
Q: If you could give one piece of advice to another innovator in the Mass General Brigham network, what would it be?
SMI: Build what you think people like you would need!
CIDH would like to thank the Sleep Initiative Team for participating in our Innovator Spotlight Series and sharing valuable information with our digital health community.
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