A San Francisco-based digital medicine company is offering an unusual new employee health insurance benefit: better sleep. Big Health is the creator of Sleepio, an online and app-based sleep improvement program.
Large employers such as LinkedIn, Boston Medical Center and the Henry Ford Health System are offering Sleepio to their employees, according to Big Health CEO Peter Hames.
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The annual employer cost of the sleep improvement program averages around $300 per employee. But Hames said people clinically diagnosed with insomnia typically cost employers an additional $3,500 annually in added healthcare costs, absenteeism and lost productivity.
“That’s a pretty significant return on investment,” he said, noting that hospital employees enrolled in Sleepio reported an average increase of 4.5 hours of sleep weekly. He said employers also report decreased absenteeism and improved productivity.
Hames said there is a growing understanding of the importance of sleep in the U.S. medical profession and employer base.
Big Health presented its Sleepio program last week at the National Business Group on Health’s Health Innovations Forum. The Washington-based NBGH described the forum as a ‘Shark Tank’-like initiative designed to help accelerate the adoption of effective healthcare technologies and solutions by large employers.
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“This opportunity with NGBH enables us to improve the health of millions of Americans who may be suffering from poor sleep,” said Hames, who co-founded Big Health in the UK with Oxford University Professor Colin Espie, a Scottish sleep medicine researcher and author. Espie designed Sleepio, employing cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to assist in improving sleep quality and duration without drugs. The program uses an automated virtual therapist to guide users.
In a 2012 randomized, placebo-controlled study of 164 adult participants in Great Britain, Sleepio was found to help users fall asleep faster and to improve the quality of their sleep. Study results were published in the journal, “Sleep,” a joint publication of the Sleep Research Society and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Hames said Sleepio delivers sleep awareness tools tailored to employer needs.
Employees complete online questionnaires to determine their sleep scores and based on those results, receive appropriate levels of sleep health training and advice through the six-week-long course. The program teaches behavioral techniques and offers evidence-based advice that includes ways to calm nervous minds and tools like sleep diaries and schedule reminders. Insomniacs can connect with their “virtual therapist” for support in the middle of the night if necessary and can access online communities of people who have been through the program.
Program users have logged more than 4 million recorded nights of sleep, according to Sleepio.