Consortium for Dental Sleep Medicine (CDSM)
Overview
This document is intended to serve as a high-level concept document for the discussion and eventual development of a Consortium for Dental Sleep Medicine. The target constituencies of the Consortium include dental-related organizations and individuals who manage Sleep-Disordered Breathing (SDB). While the Consortium has a primary focus on dentists, it also invites and welcomes businesses, organizations, and/or individuals who can partner with the dentist in treating SDB.
Our first formal meeting for the Consortium will be held on Thursday, April 19, 2012, from 2:00PM – 4:00PM, the day before our Spring 2012 conference. Both the Conference and Consortium will be held at the Talking Stick Resort & Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona.
You have the option to register for this important forum when you register for the Spring All-Appliance Conference. If you do not wish to register for the conference but plan to attend the Consortium meeting, please email or call Andrew, the ACSDD Director of Operations, at andrew@acsdd.org or 814.490.2019.
Statement of the Problem
Dentists who have embedded or who are thinking about embedding dental sleep medicine in their practice face many significant challenges. Those challenges range from an uninformed public, unenlightened dentists, and ill-informed physicians to uninformed insurance payers, uncompromising government payers, and others. As a result, the patient does not get the proper treatment in a timely manner. The conditions that result from nondiagnosis and subsequent lack of treatment add additional strain to an already strained health care system. The system needs fixing, and there is strength in numbers.
Thus, the Consortium Effort.
While the Consortium Effort sponsored by the ACSDD focuses on the issues that dental sleep medicine dentists contend with on a regular basis here in the USA, it is also intended to serve as the unifying body for others countries across the globe to unite organizations, individuals, and companies who broadly or specifically manage sleep-disordered breathing in order to address, collectively, the major issues that heretofore have not been effectively addressed. In fact, we have not only launched our USA initiative, but we have also launched the Consortium Effort with our Canadian friends in the same regard.
This unifying body is not intended to disrupt the operations, activities, or mission of the participating individuals, organizations, or companies. It focuses on addressing the major issues others have failed to address.
CDSM Purpose & Vision
The purpose of the Consortium is to join all like-minded organizations that embrace a multidisciplinary treatment perspective to educate, research, and advocate for change in the treatment of SBD across the globe.
The CDSM is committed to combining all like-minded organizations to accomplish the following:
(1) To educate physicians, dentists, and the public on the impact of sleep breathing disorders on the health and wellbeing of individuals and on the health care system;
(2) To support valid research of sleep breathing disorders and their treatment;
(3) To advocate for the successful treatment of the patient, pediatric or adult, by addressing politicians and the medical and dental communities and insurance organizations that have the capacity to effect change.
While the Consortium serves as a unified body, it never interferes with the autonomy and operations of individual members.
CDSM Function
The major function of the Consortium is first to collectively develop an agenda of those critical items that we face, then to collectively develop how we are going to address those items as a unified voice, and then to collectively act upon that plan.
CDSM Advantages
- Operating with one another at the highest professional and ethical levels.
- Focusing on the collective success of the CDSM.
- Committing to non-endorsement of products, individuals and/or services at consortium events.
- Expressly forbidding all political or self-serving motivations.
- Operating with one another as honest partners where each CDSM member’s word is a contract.
- Expecting open and honest discourse and dialogue.
- Resolving problems amongst members with openness, honesty, and directness.
- Sharing knowledge, resources, and faculty.
- Coordinating dates of conferences with one another.
- Combining conferences to share resources and reduce expenses.
- Offering joint membership capabilities to CDSM members.
- Coordinating training courses to avoid overlaps.
- Supporting one another through recognition/support on each another’s websites via logos and website links.
- Meeting annually to assess the effectiveness of the CDSM and adjust the CDSM agenda.
Conclusion
There is a huge hill ahead of us if we desire to have any impact. What can be argued is that the dental community lacks a common voice and focus. I have been told and agree, “Until the dental community gets its act together, no one will listen.” I propose we get our act together once and for all. For far too long we have worked our own agendas. By doing that, our numbers have been divided and our efforts marginalized. There is only one solution; we must come together with common goals for major influence.
All due speed is needed for the Consortium to get it active. The longer it takes for us to get organized the farther behind we get. I will be moving with as many other interested organizations and businesses as possible. “If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always got.” The time to act differently is now.
