Mayo Clinic Announces Opening of New Freestanding Sleep Disorders Center on its Jacksonville Campus

Monday, July 11, 2011

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Mayo Clinic today announced the opening of its new $3.8 million, 10,000-square-foot freestanding Sleep Disorders Center on the clinic's Jacksonville campus. The new facility is located at the west end of Mayo Clinic's campus at 4634 Worrall Way, across the street from the Gabriel House of Care.

VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including comments by Dr. Kaplan about the Sleep Disorders Center, are available online.

In 1989, Mayo Clinic became the first sleep disorders program in northeast Florida and the second in the state to be accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Unlike many local sleep disorders programs whose practices are focused primarily on treating sleep apnea patients, Mayo Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center can treat a broad spectrum of sleep disorders including sleep apnea, narcolepsy and parasomnias such as night seizures, sleep talking and sleepwalking. Mayo Clinic currently treats nearly 1,000 sleep disorder patients annually in Jacksonville and that number is expected to dramatically increase with the opening of the new center.

In many cases, the new center will allow patients to complete their entire sleep evaluation within 24 hours. Patients will check in for monitoring overnight and leave the next day already knowing the results of their exam and ready to begin a treatment plan. The diagnosis and treatment plan is developed on-site in collaboration by a team of physicians that may include a pulmonologist, cardiologist, neurologist and sleep disorders specialist depending on the underlying reason for the referral. Another advantage of the new center is that the sleeping rooms have a residential design that offers a more comfortable, homelike environment. This creates an experience that is similar to what patients experience at home which should result in a more accurate sleep evaluation. Finally, the center is located in a private and secluded area of Mayo Clinic's campus, so very few, if any, distractions would prevent patients from a restful night's sleep while they are being monitored.

The facility's eight patient rooms are designed to allow much of the medical testing equipment involved in the sleep exam to be hidden. All monitoring is done in one central location, where technicians can monitor patients in all of the bedrooms and when necessary, remotely adjust climate control, oxygen administration and continuous positive pressure (CPAP). This means fewer disturbances to the patient and results in better sleep and a more accurate collection of sleep data necessary to make an accurate diagnosis and an effective treatment plan.

"With an estimated 40 million Americans annually suffering from chronic, long-term sleep disorders, this is a growing segment of our practice that not only requires special expertise by a multidisciplinary team of experts, but facilities designed to conduct the complex testing necessary to make an accurate diagnosis, "says Joseph Kaplan, M.D., a pulmonologist and director of Mayo Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center. "Our new Sleep Disorders Center allows Mayo Clinic to not only increase the number of patients we can treat each year, but to offer the best possible diagnosis and treatment plan for our patients."

Mayo Clinic's new Sleep Disorders Center is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

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