For most adults with suspected obstructive sleep apnea, a home sleep apnea test (HSAT) is clinically equivalent to an in-lab polysomnogram for the purpose of making a diagnosis. Here’s the underlying clinical reasoning.
The Dorma test is a Type III home sleep apnea test. It records six clinically important signals during sleep:
Together, these are the inputs a sleep physician needs to identify apnea events (full breathing pauses) and hypopnea events (partial breathing reductions accompanied by oxygen desaturation). Counting those events over the recording produces the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI): the standard clinical metric used to grade obstructive sleep apnea severity.
Under the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s scoring criteria:
Treatment recommendations follow severity. Mild OSA is often managed with positional therapy, weight management, or an oral appliance. Moderate-to-severe OSA is most commonly treated with positive airway pressure (CPAP, APAP, or BiPAP).
Single-night HSATs can misclassify severity because AHI varies night to night. Multi-night recording has been shown in the literature to produce more stable AHI estimates and reduces the chance of a borderline case being mis-staged. Dorma standardizes on three consecutive nights of recording for every test.
Home sleep apnea testing is most appropriate for adults with a moderate-to-high pre-test probability of moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea and without significant medical comorbidities. It is generally not the right tool for:
If a member of our physician network determines a home test isn’t the right tool for you, your order is refunded in full and we’ll point you toward the right type of evaluation.
The recording is interpreted by a board-certified sleep medicine physician licensed in your state. They review the raw signals (not just a derived score), score apneas and hypopneas using AASM criteria, and write a formal diagnosis report. If treatment is appropriate, they make a specific therapy recommendation. If you choose to pursue CPAP, they also write the prescription.
The Dorma test corresponds to CPT codes 95800 and 95806 in the U.S. coding system. For Medicare beneficiaries the equivalent is HCPCS G0399. Dorma is currently a cash-pay service and does not bill these codes to insurance.
None of this should be construed as medical advice. The information on this page is general clinical context. Your physician’s interpretation of your specific study is the only thing that matters for your care.
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