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The increasing availability and complexity of sleep and circadian data are equally exciting and challenging. The field is in constant technological development, generating better high-resolution physiological and molecular data than ever before. Yet, the promise of large-scale studies leveraging millions of patients is limited by suboptimal approaches for data sharing and interoperability. As a result, integration of valuable clinical and basic resources is problematic, preventing knowledge discovery and rapid translation of findings into clinical care. To understand the current data landscape in the sleep and circadian domains, the Sleep Research Society (SRS) and the Sleep Research Network (now a task force of the SRS) organized a workshop on informatics and data harmonization, presented at the World Sleep Congress 2019, in Vancouver, Canada. Experts in translational informatics gathered with sleep research experts to discuss opportunities and challenges in defining strategies for data harmonization. The goal of this workshop was to fuel discussion and foster innovative approaches for data integration and development of informatics infrastructure supporting multi-site collaboration. Key recommendations included collecting and storing findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data; identifying existing international cohorts and resources supporting research in sleep and circadian biology; and defining the most relevant sleep data elements and associated metadata that could be supported by early integration initiatives. This report introduces foundational concepts with the goal of facilitating engagement between the sleep/circadian and informatics communities and is a call to action for the implementation and adoption of data harmonization strategies in this domain.

Introduction Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is very prevalent in the Veterans Administrations (VA) clinical population, affecting about 24% of Veterans. Sleep medicine services in VA suffers from uneven distribution, which especially affects Veterans in rural populations, where care is often not available except by long distance travel. Travel burden is increasingly recognized as a burden on Veteran care that can be ameliorated by telemedicine. Little is known about travel burden and few attempts have been made to quantify it. We have attempted to quantify travel burden for rural Veterans using data from VA's Office of Rural Health supported Enterprise Wide Initiative for Telesleep Medicine. In this project we focus on travel from a Veteran's home to a facility-based sleep clinic visit (traditional face-face visit) vs. how much travel would be avoided if visits were performed using video-based telemedicine with the Veteran at his/her residence. Methods Purpose built geocoding software (validated in prior studies) was used to quantify the driving distance from the Veterans home zipcode to the zipcode of the facility where the visits would were performed. The data were taken from the VA's national corporate data warehouse (CDW). Over 4 million sleep encounters were coded. CPT4 codes were used to define the clinic visit encounters from 2016 through 2020. We set the travel range where telemedicine is reasonable based on distance at greater than 40 miles from the VA medical center which is how VA currently defines "distant travel". Results No. of Encounters (thous) 2016, 557; 2017, 623; 2018, 678; 2019, 667; 2020, 420Miles ObsTravel (mil) 2016, 38; 2017, 42; 2018, 45; 2019, 43; 2020, 27 Miles Travel if telemed used (mil) 2016, 25; 2017, 27; 2018, 29; 2019, 27: 2020, 17Difference (mil miles) 2016, 13; 2017, 15; 2018, 16; 2019, 16 2020, 10Between 10 and 16 million miles could be saved each year for sleep medicine visits if all travel > 40 miles was converted to video home visits. Conclusion Travel burden in this analysis, defined by miles driven to and from a sleep medicine encounter, could be dramatically reduced if telemedicine visits were used for sleep apnea evaluation and management. This reduction in travel equates to a reduction in automobile related use-costs, lower carbon footprint, fewer automobile crashes with injury and death. Assuming that clinical effectiveness of home telemedicine is comparable to traditional visits, these data support the vigorous adoption of telemedicine for sleep medicine services. Support (If Any) VA Office of Rural Health; Measurement QUERI, San Francisco VA Medical