CHI PAP: CommunityHealth Initiative for Patient-Centered Apnea Protocols
2021 Community Sleep Health and Public Awareness Grant
Justin Fiala, MD
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Community Health
Key Project Outcomes
While lip service is often paid to sleep health disparities, real-world solutions are few and far between. The CommunityHealth Initiative for Patient-centered Apnea Protocols (CHI-PAP) is an innovative model aimed at increasing access to sleep-related care for low-resource individuals by leveraging community partnerships and up-cycling waste within the sleep care ecosystem.
In partnership with CommunityHealth Chicago, the nation’s largest volunteer-run free clinic, our program takes patients through four distinct phases of care: triage/referral, diagnostic testing, CPAP initiation, and long-term follow-up, in the process providing them with comprehensive evaluation and treatment for their sleep complaints.
Thanks to the generous support of the AASM Foundation and our community and industry partners, in our first year we’ve provided low-resource individuals with over 100 unique sleep specialist visits, including home sleep testing and provision of CPAP and supplies, all free of cost to the patient. Beyond that, we proved that this type of grassroots model for addressing unmet sleep health needs is both feasible and effective.
If you’d like to learn more about our initiative and/or donate to our cause, please visit www.chi-pap.org.
Abstract
AMERICAN THORACIC SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Journal Article
JOURNAL OF CLINICAL SLEEP MEDICINE
Attarian H, et al. Increasing Awareness of Sleep Disorders in a Safety Net Clinic-Role of Medical Education: A pilot program. JCSM. 2023. Accepted for Publication. EMID: 1ee9cdc4575e6108