The Need for More Sleep Education in Medicine: Yuri Maricich, MD, MBA

WATCH TIME: 2 minutes

“I still talk to clinicians every week who are not familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or it being first line. No one taught me how to write a prescription for software when I went through training. We still need lots of education to say, ‘Look, we now have a whole new set of treatment tools,’ that are prescription digital therapeutics.”

In recent years, the literature has begun to grow on the use of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), and its effectiveness in treating individuals with the sleep disorder. Particularly for those who have not been able to able to achieve full benefits from pharmacologic treatment, CBT-I has made a case as an add-on to fill in those gaps.

A recent study assessing the potential of this CBT approach was conducted by a group including Yuri Maricich, MD, MBA, internal medicine physician, and chief medical officer and head of development, Pear Therapeutics. They published data from a real-world cohort of individuals who utilized the digital therapeutic Somryst (previously known as SHUTi), which showed positive results for reductions in healthcare resource utilization, associated costs, and insomnia severity effects of the therapy.¹

To find out more about the use of CBT-I across medical practice and the need for more education on these types of digital prescription therapeutics, NeurologyLive^® sat down for a conversation with Maricich. He provided his point of view on the current state of understanding about these treatment options and the priority that sleep is given in clinical care.

REFERENCE
1. Forma F, Knight TG, Thorndike FP, et al. Real-World Evaluation of Clinical Response and Long-Term Healthcare Resource Utilization Patterns Following Treatment with a Digital Therapeutic for Chronic Insomnia. Clinicoecon Outcomes Res. 2022;14:537-546. doi:10.2147/CEOR.S368780