Sleep Heart Health Study

6.2 Structure

The Sleep Reading Center (SRC) will be directed by Susan Redline, MD, MPH. She will hire and assist in the training of an Administrative Assistant, a Chief Polysomnologist, and PSG scorers, and be ultimately responsible for all goals specified above.

Physician investigators will assist in the development of scoring procedures. They will participate in weekly staff meetings that discuss issues with scoring and quality control.

The Chief Polysomonologist (CP) will be directly responsible for training and certifying scorers and centrally trained field research assistants. S/he will participate in the development of teaching materials for training and for procedures for certifying scorers and assuring high levels of accuracy and reproducibility of scoring procedures. S/he will review each PSG record within 72 hours of its receipt at the SRC, identifying medical alerts for priority scoring, and providing feedback on the quality of studies received to field site technicians, and assist in identifying equipment problems. S/he will triage studies for formal scoring to the scorers, monitoring their performance, and providing support for interpreting ambiguous studies. S/he will implement on-going procedures for assuring accuracy and reproducibility of scored procedures.

Three to five scorers will be charged with the responsibility of directly scoring all records. They will be charged with the task of scoring 2-3 records/day and participating in scoring QA procedures.