Q&A with NOCTEM Health Founder and CEO Anne Germain
Modernizing behavioral sleep care with science-based digital solutions.
NOCTEMⓇ Health designs, creates, validates, and deploys science-based digital sleep solutions to detect and treat acute and chronic sleep disturbances in clinical and operational settings. We ask Noctem’s Founder and CEO Anne Germain a few questions to learn more about her journey to entrepreneurship.
Could you provide background on your education and how your research led to this idea?
I am a clinical psychologist with 25+ years of expertise in sleep research and behavioral sleep medicine, the specialty that treats sleep disorders with behavior modification and without medications. I grew frustrated with the setbacks of traditional behavioral sleep medicine that block non-specialists from delivering successful sleep treatments to their patients with insomnia and the lack of patients’ timely access to sleep care.
There’s a global insomnia crisis. In the USA alone, 70M Americans suffer from insomnia. And it’s getting worse. Insomnia affects your mental and physical health, family, work, wealth… essentially it affects your life. In this crisis, insomnia is winning. It costs over $160B per year in healthcare and lost productivity.
There is a cure for insomnia, the best treatment is through behavior changes, and I happen to be one of the world’s experts in the behavioral treatment of insomnia.
During my 25-year academic career, I have developed and tested sleep treatments. I studied the brain mechanisms that contribute to sleep disorders and sleep treatments, treated thousands of patients, and trained hundreds of healthcare providers to do the same.
I eventually realized that training more specialists would never be enough to solve the insomnia crisis. There is only one insomnia specialist for 2.8M patients in the USA and world-wide. The shortage of experts — and insomnia care! — is largely due to the fact that treatments that work still rely on archaic and burdensome manual data collection and analysis methods. These methods are too time consuming and not profitable for busy healthcare providers who care for patients with insomnia.
I founded NOCTEM to make the cure for insomnia accessible to millions, to seize the night — or Carpe Noctem!
How did you explore creating your product?
First, the clinical sleep science was clear from the get-go: the involvement of a healthcare provider in insomnia care is critical to achieve the best patient engagement and clinical outcomes. So, self-help apps were not an option for us. Instead, we designed the first clinical decision support platform to upskill non-experts and scale all clinicians’ capacity to offer the recommended insomnia treatment to their patients at scale.
We tested a rough prototype to ensure that the use of technology would yield the same clinical outcomes as we see with the traditional in-person insomnia treatment. We then built on our established relationships with the Department of Defense and all military branches to validate our commercial-grade clinical decision platform with healthcare providers of service members with chronic insomnia, nightmares, and other chronic sleep disorders.
We built COAST (Clinician-Operated Assistive Sleep Technology), a clinical decision support platform based on years of research. COAST is a solution to overcome the traditional setbacks and accelerate patients’ access to care.
COAST is designed to:
-Upskill non-specialists so that ANY healthcare providers can treat insomnia.
-Overcome the barriers that block delivery and access.
The COAST clinician portal and algorithms behind it guide the clinician through each step of the treatment, tailored for each patient, in just 5–10 minutes per week over 4–6 weeks, which represents a 12X increase in productivity. Patients provide data daily and receive their weekly clinician-approved recommendations directly through the patient app.
We have shown that COAST yields comparable clinical outcomes as traditional in-person treatment, and that more patients complete a course of treatment with COAST than with self-help apps.
Why are you the best team to champion this product?
We have a deep understanding of the insomnia problem, its treatment, and how it impacts both clinical workflows and patients’ lives. We understand how effective our solution is because of our close relationships with our customers. The NOCTEM team is diverse with expertise in both digital health technology and clinical data science and engaged directors and advisors to guide our progress. Our solution is de-risked with over $4.5M in non-dilutive funding to date, and we have growing traction through sales, partnerships, and contracts.
We execute and deliver sleep solutions that are science-based, user-focused, and can solve the insomnia problem.
We are lean, yet fierce.
What were some aspects of the processes that surprised you?
Designing intuitive digital health technology that captures the hundreds of decisions made by a healthcare provider and a patient to optimize clinical impact. We had to consider adoption, seamless workflow integration, engagement, and retention which made this a multi-disciplinary, multi-layered and complex art in software development.
How did you make sure your product was a reflection of your target audience’s needs?
We invested time speaking with our audience to verify our assumptions and detail the specific requirements that would (1) seamlessly integrate into the workflow of busy clinicians; (2) overcome the pain points of traditional behavioral sleep medicine for both clinicians and patients; and (3) maximize patient engagement and clinical outcomes.
What has been some of the customer feedback?
Customers and partners consistently comment on the intuitive nature of the platform and patient app, the quality of its user interfaces, and the unique advantage of our clinician-in-the-loop approach (vs. self-help apps or tele-health insomnia offerings). This allows them to maintain the continuity of care and control the quality of their patients’ sleep care. Some testimonials we have received:
- “…COAST facilitates information sharing and a collaborative treatment approach necessary in 21st century, patient-centered care.”
- “The COAST secure messaging feature provides peace of mind to my patients that they can get in touch with me between sessions if any difficulties or questions arise.”
- “The ability to collect sleep data and communicate with patients online has helped tremendously in transitioning to virtual appointments due to COVID.”
- COAST saves me time in session to focus on patient needs rather than focusing on calculating their sleep averages.”
How does AlphaLab Health help you reach your goals?
We want to deepen our understanding of the interests, forces, and influences that drive customers and decision makers across different segments of healthcare.
What is next?
Accelerate our traction, support more healthcare providers to treat more patients.
As we grow our user base, we are also establishing the foundation for a true software as a medical device (SaMD), so that we can continue to scale access to evidence-based behavioral sleep treatments.
What is the most important thing for readers to know about what NOCTEM does and how that’s beneficial to users?
NOCTEM is first and leading in true digital behavioral sleep medicine. We provide the evidence-based digital solutions needed to solve the insomnia crisis to all healthcare providers and their patients.
How can consumers follow you?
Website, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Outside of work, what do you like to do in your free time?
Free time? Travel, fiddle, friends, and sleep, of course!
