Businesses that create ways to reduce health-care costs are helping all businesses that share the cost of escalating medical bills.
Advanced Research Systems, founded by Larry Walker, has developed the technology to easily monitor people with sleeping disorders. Walker also operates a sleep disorders clinic in a building east of Pioneer Valley Hospital as a joint venture with of HealthTrust Inc., to which Pioneer Valley belongs.ARS has come up with a small monitoring device called Sleepwalker 3000 that replaces a device about the size of the ordinary desk. Sleepwalker 3000 is 8 inches long, 4 inches wide and less than 2 inches thick and allows a sleep disorder patient to be tested at home rather than visiting the clinic.
Walker said Sleepwalker 3000 has 25 channels and can measure blood pressure, brain waves, eye movement, muscle activity, body movement, body position, heart activity, respiration, breathing sounds, leg muscle activity, oxygen blood levels and temperature.
So far, Walker's clinic is focusing on sleep apnea, a condition associated with snoring that he says can actually be fatal since the person stops breathing while sleeping.
By using the Sleepwalker 3000 in the home or the clinic, the wires are attached to the patient who falls asleep. The next day the data is downloaded from the monitor into a large computer and then put on a screen for analysis by certified sleep disorder technicians.
Walker, who has established 15 sleep disorder clinics for HealthTrust and non-HealthTrust hospitals, said Sleepwalker 3000 can be customized and software written to adapt to any measurement that may or may not deal with sleep disorders.
The monitor can be used by cardiologists, pulmonologists, neurologists, psychiatrists or other specialists. "The fact that it is mobile opens the doors to very sophisticated diagnostic testing which may be more realistic when collected outside the hospital," he said.
Originally, many pieces of equipment were required for sleep monitoring. Eventually they were integrated into one unit and technology later reduced the size to that of a small television set. Walker's Sleepwalker 3000 is small enough to be strapped to a person's leg so monitoring can continue if the patient walks in his sleep or goes to the bathroom.
Walker's clinic serves as the hub for 15 clinics in the U.S., which send information via modem or laser optical disk for interpretation. Reports are prepared and sent back to the attending physician who immediately starts treating the patient with sleep disorders.
A native of Salt Lake City, Walker was raised in southern California, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1981 and did graduate work at the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Department of Medical Biophysics and computing.
In the early 1980s he did research at Stanford University and in 1983 was hired by LDS Hospital to establish and direct a sleep disorders clinic. In 1987 he was named director of the sleep disorders clinic at Pioneer Valley and founded his company in 1989.