Province signs new agreement with private sleep study company

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This article was published 27/06/2023 (849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE provincial government extended its work with a private provider of sleep studies even as it promised conditional funding to the sleep lab at the Misericordia Health Centre.

The government has entered another agreement with Cerebra Medical, this time to conduct as many as 10,000 sleep studies over the next two years.

A provincial spokesperson refused to release the value of the agreement or say how much the government has spent on what it describes as an interim two-year partnership agreement.

“This agreement offers patients comprehensive, convenient and timely access to at-home testing, diagnosis, treatment planning and care — at no cost to them,” the provincial spokesperson stated.

Cerebra president and chief operating officer Patrick Crampton declined to comment on the terms of the latest agreement, stating the government would have to release that information.

The new agreement, for up to 10,000 studies, is nearly double the current waiting list of roughly 5,800 patients who are in the queue for a study at the Sleep Disorder Centre at Misericordia.

Cerebra was contracted to complete 1,000 sleep studies through a request for service agreement with Manitoba, but the company only got 237 referrals, and only 158 studies were completed before the agreement expired on March 31.

Earlier this month, the provincial diagnostic and surgical recovery task force said it was continuing to work with Cerebra, but no details of the government’s extended agreement were released at that time.

The focus of the June 7 announcement by task force steering committee chairman Dr. Peter MacDonald was a promise that the task force would provide additional funding to the Sleep Disorder Centre at Misericordia. The $1.8 million in additional funding was conditional on the sleep lab handing over its full patient wait-list to the government.

The Sleep Disorder Centre has yet to get the funding, and the government stated the centre hasn’t provided its waiting list. The task force has stated it needs that list to provide patient referrals to Cerebra.

Dr. Nancy Porhownik, a sleep specialist and co-section head of respirology in the University of Manitoba department of medicine, said the current waiting list is 5,800 patients.

Porhownik said Monday the centre hasn’t been given details about the government’s agreement with Cerebra, nor has staff been told what will be funded by the $1.8 million promised for the sleep lab.

The lab’s administration staff has regularly reported waiting list data to the government for years, but the sleep disorder centre still doesn’t want to provide patients’ personal information, she said.

“We still have concerns about handing over names of patients who’ve been referred to us without some understanding of what they’re going to do with that information and that it’s going to be handled properly.”

Porhownik said she is concerned privately provided sleep studies will lead to the overprescription of CPAP machines.

Porhownik and Sleep Disorder Centre medical director Dr. Eleni Giannouli resigned in April from their clinical advisory roles with the task force over concerns the task force was exclusively focused on securing private contracts.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com