In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steven Schwartz speaks with Dr. Sahil Chopra, founder of Empower Sleep, about the critical importance of sleep and innovative solutions for sleep testing. Dr. Chopra shares his journey from traditional medicine to creating a company focused on improving sleep health through accessible diagnostics. The conversation explores the impact of sleep on overall health, the evolution of sleep medicine, and how data-driven insights can empower both physicians and patients to make informed decisions about sleep health.
 

Chapters
 

00:00 The Importance of Sleep
08:23 Empower Sleep: A New Approach to Sleep Medicine
16:05 Understanding Sleep Testing and Data
23:38 Transforming Sleep Health: Insights and Recommendations

15:17 Navigating the Transition to DPC for Physicians
 
Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s my pleasure to have you along on our discussion today. Dr. Sahil Chopra. Sahil, thank you for being with me today.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (00:36)
Thanks for having me, Steven

I’m excited to have today.

Steven Schwartz (00:39)
Wonderful. Thank you. And your company is Empower Sleep. I tell you what, sleep is so important to every single one of us. And if we don’t get enough good quality restorative sleep, it could lead to a whole lot of additional problems. And I love the fact that your business is completely focused on helping people sleep better. You and I met at the Concierge Medical Forum.

was in October in Georgia. And I heard your keynotes talk on sleep and how your ring that people can wear for a 30 night and beyond sleep study. It was fascinating. The data that you brought up and how

the traditional way, I guess, of having a sleep study where you go home, let’s say, and you’re hooked up with the nasal cannula and the different leads and wires and cables and stuff. My thought is, how are you supposed to sleep and have a normal night’s sleep with all this stuff hooked up to you? I’ve had sleep apnea for several years. And if I’ve ever done one of these sleep studies, I’m not sleeping properly with all these wires.

I’ve jumped into a lot of details already here, but I can’t wait to get into this discussion with you today. Sahil, please tell us a little bit about your background, your training medically and where you worked and how you came into performing Empower Sleep.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (02:12)
Yeah, no, thank you, Steven, for having me here today. I’m always excited to chat about sleep and drive awareness about its importance. I have pretty humble beginnings. I’m an internist by training. I did residency at UCLA, and then I worked as an hospitalist. Hospitalists are people who just do inpatient internal medicine. I did that for about three years.

before going back to training and end up specializing in pulmonary and critical care medicine. I always loved working in the ICU. I love taking care of like really critically ill people. And, you know, during that time became sort of very aware of a breathing problem called sleep apnea. And the reason is as a pulmonary fellow,

there’s a big overlap between sleep apnea and pulmonary medicine because it’s a breathing problem except you’re sleeping. And so we would see these patients in our pulmonary clinic and it would take these patients months to get in, months to get a sleep study, months to get started on treatment. And that was kind of frustrating. And around that same time, if…

any of your audience has any idea of pulmonary critical care, it’s a very busy fellowship. You’re working like 70 plus hours a week consistently. And so I was like also, and we had a young family at the time. We had two kids over three years and I was very sleep deprived. It’s kind of like burning both ends of the candle. So like seeing these patients in clinic who had just horrible sleep and then

personally experiencing like how difficult it is to sort of get through a day when you’re not sleeping well for months to years, I became really like fascinated by the world of sleep medicine and end up doing a sleep medicine fellowship. Luckily, I matched in Boston, was at Harvard. And, you know, when you’re in some of these more like phenomenal institutions, you’re just surrounded by really intelligent people.

who look at a disease or a specialty very differently than maybe a community program might, and was really exposed to what sleep medicine really is, what circadian science really is, and ever since then, the idea has been how do we replicate that kind of scientific, science-backed care in a way that is accessible for patients.

Steven Schwartz (04:59)
Right. so what was the process of creating the company of Empower Sleep itself?

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (05:06)
You know, kind of like, I kind of stumbled upon it by a mix of like accident as well as wanting to do what I was taught in fellowship. And, you know, I finished fellowship in 2020. It was the middle of the pandemic and I was spending a lot of time working in the intensive care units.

I mean, we don’t need to go back too far in time, but it was a really challenging time for people who were working in the inpatient setting because of COVID. The hospitals were full, people were overworked. And if someone’s sleep is unhealthy, their tolerance to stress is much lower. so that was like when, I would talk to nurses, other doctors who were just.

psychologically struggling in that time. And I would just have this conversation like, dude, how’s your sleep? Like, how are you feeling? How’s your sleep? And for people who had bad sleep to begin with, I would make a recommendation, I think you should get a sleep study because I think this is what’s going on. And sleep labs had also shut down at the time. So what I started doing was just out of like wanting my…

colleagues to get a sleep study, bought a whole bunch of recorders and I just kept them in my car. And I would just kind of hand them out to colleagues and say like, do this study and let’s see what the results are tomorrow. And I’ll tell you what to do. And that’s kind of like how this idea was born of like, Hey, you can take care of people in a very simplistic way, just by handing them something, having them do the test, learning what you find, and then giving them some recommendations.

sending a prescription for a CPAP or calling in a prescription for a medication or anything of that nature. And that’s kind of like the inception of wanting to provide care to people. And then over time, as you learn and you experiment, the model continues to change. And we stumbled on this idea of longitudinal testing by accident as well.

I had a couple of people that I was taking care of and I basically, you know, they kept the sensor longer than what, you know, what was in the directions. And I said, and because they already had it out of curiosity after they received treatment, said, Hey, why don’t you just retest? I’m curious to see what your sleep looks like now. So now we started collecting pre and post data about someone’s sleep. And then

Now, some people did not respond as well as what I thought that they had, because now you have objective data that explains how their sleep is changing. So then it became very clear that, like if we’re gonna look at sleep, we need to look at it across time because sleep disorders are a chronic condition. We can’t just look at it as a snapshot. And then over a period of time, it kind of evolved into this sort of longitudinal testing program where we give these sensors to patients like,

continue to test on a nightly basis. They continue to meet with their doctor virtually and we help them like optimize their sleep, mitigate pathology and make their sleep as physiologic as possible over a period of time. So it’s been a journey. I can’t say like this was like the idea to begin with, but over a period of time, you you listen to enough of your patients. There’s always like something, nugget of information and knowledge that you can learn from them.

And in the process of doing that, this company has kind of been built.

Steven Schwartz (08:57)
Yeah, what a great story. And thank you for what you were doing, you and your colleagues trying to navigate a whole lot of sick people during the pandemic. I think for people who were not in the hospitals and not in a medical setting really, really have no true idea of how awful it was for a lot of a lot of months, you know, with the full hospitals that you’re talking about and.

losing people and not enough ventilators and the whole deal. And it’s like, gosh, what are we going to do about this? And we hear vaccines coming. Is that going to help? And just thank you from truly from the bottom of my heart for what you and your colleagues did during that really horrific time.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (09:42)
Thank you. Thank you. was a tough time for sure.

Steven Schwartz (09:46)
Exactly. So as I mentioned earlier on, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea maybe seven or eight, nine years ago now, something like that. And I never had a sleep doctor. And my ear, nose, and throat doctor had a take-home sleep study test that he said, well, want to strap this up. Here’s how it works and bring it back tomorrow. So I did.

And the data came back right away that I was holding my breath for more than 30 seconds, multiple times per hour. And my blood oxygen level was down and all that. And that was enough data for him to see that, yep, you have mild to moderate sleep apnea and you should be on a CPAP machine. And so that was literally all I had. And I just started using the machine. Obviously for me, it took a couple of weeks to really get used to this thing of what felt like a hurricane getting shot up my nose while I was trying to sleep.

trying to find the right mask and all that. one thing, after talking to you and understanding about the longevity testing, which I love about your company, is that I never really knew if using the CPAP machine actually was helping relieve the symptoms or the situation of holding my breath too much because I just simply started using it and I never had another sleep test from that doctor for several years had passed.

And my, my digital marketing company did a website for a new doctor in my town who was specifically sleep medicine. He was a, I guess a former anesthesiologist as well and got into sleep study split their sleep medicine. And he said, well, let’s do a new test. And he sent me home and he said, go ahead and test it, you know, without the CPAP. And I thought, are you serious? I’m afraid I’m not going to survive the night. Cause I think I really need this thing. I count on it.

And but he said, you’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. So I did and saw that I still had sleep apnea. But I never tested the second time, again, with all these tubes and wires and stuff all over me. I never tested while still using the CPAP machine. So all that being said, when I met you at the conference a couple of months ago and you had a special offer for people at the conference, if they’d like to to try a 30 day sleep study, I was like, sign me up.

I remember talking to you about it there. And your product that you sent me is literally a ring that I wore, actually on my thumb, for 30 days. And it captured data. synced to my iPhone. And you guys had the data instantly. Can you talk a little bit more specifically about how a test is actually done and how it can record so much data, literally from just a ring that you wear on your finger?

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (12:38)
Yeah, totally. Thanks for sharing your experience. That’s a very common story that I hear all the time, sometimes many times a day. And it’s a problem that we’re solving for. to talk a little bit about the testing, I want to just take a step back and talk about this idea of sleep, because I think what may have happened is

You were just told that you have mild to moderate sleep apnea. And here’s a machine to possibly address or fix it. But what if I told you that your sleep is really the housekeeping process for your body?

And like part of the dysfunction of your sleep is because of sleep apnea. But what the real goal should be is to make this housekeeping as optimal as possible. And when we think about sleep that way, it kind of like opens the doors of a whole bunch of possibilities of like, what are all the things that can be done for someone’s sleep to make their sleep as strong as possible foundation for their health?

Right? treating hypertension is very different than optimizing their cardiovascular health. Treating dementia is very different than improving someone’s brain health. Treating sleep apnea similarly is very different than improving their sleep health. So the idea here for us is really like, how do we help people improve their sleep health using medical grade diagnostics that exist? And, you know,

When you think about these medical grade diagnostics for sleep assessments, which I think is a better way to call it rather than like a sleep apnea test, because what you’re really understanding is what is happening to someone’s sleep, what is happening to their physiology while they are sleeping. And then you can identify sleep apnea, you can identify insomnia, restless legs, all of these different things. And the way, you know, sleep,

testing works is either one can measure sleep directly on the scalp by looking at EEG, which typically happens in labs and it can also be done at home. So you’re measuring sleep directly from the central nervous system. The other way to measure sleep is by looking at breathing or the cardiovascular system, and then you’re looking at sleep through the autonomic nervous system.

So these sensors, whether it’s an Apple watch or a Garmin or a Fitbit, or this is an example of one of the sensors that we use that goes on any one of your fingers. And these are basically measuring sleep by looking at the autonomic nervous system. They have a very high resolution of sampling of data from your heart rate to then derive.

heart rate variability, cyclic variation, heart rate, respiratory rate, respiratory rate variability. And using these signals, we’re able to understand what is happening to someone’s physiology during this window of sleep. And what that means is you can like, you can understand their sleep architecture from a deep sleep, light sleep, REM standpoint. You can understand their heart rate. You can understand their arousals, these awakenings.

They also have an accelerometer built into them so you can understand how much movement they have to start identifying like restless sleep or movement disorders. You can understand how well they’re breathing so you can identify sleep apnea. You can identify a whole host of things, both from a respiratory, cardiovascular, brain health and movement standpoint.

Steven Schwartz (16:28)
It blew me away when I had my meeting with your physician assistant and an MV at the end of my 30 days and they pulled up the screen, obviously virtually with all this data. It completely blew me away. It’s like unbelievable amount of information about how I slept, not just one night for a couple of hours, but literally the whole night. In fact, your MD had said, you know, everything

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (16:35)
Yeah.

Steven Schwartz (16:58)
pretty good, but this like there was this shift like all of a sudden you were going to bed much later and wake or going to bed much later and waking up much later. And I looked at my calendar. Now I’m in Florida and my wife and I, as I told you, just went out in November. We went out to a conference in Anaheim, California next to Disneyland. And so we figured out how my sleep was different during the week. I was three hours later time zones. Right. And it’s like, OK.

It captured all of that beautifully. And it made sense to your physician who looked at my report. And so we had a great discussion. And it was so fascinating to me saying, well, this is what happened here. And this is what was going on here. And here’s recommendations that we can give you, that can help you sleep better. It also showed that the fact that I’m using this as a ResMed, something or other CPAP machine.

that it’s actually working. It’s good for me. And for the most part, I’m in good shape. think we adjusted the range of the air pressure or something a little bit. But for the most part, I was doing good. And it helped me feel so much more comfortable and would say settled that there was a problem identified nine or 10 years ago. It’s been treated. But we’ve actually done a more proper, more deep

test showing that with the CPAP, I actually am sleeping better and it is in fact working. And for that, I’m very grateful to your company and your team and staff and technology.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (18:35)
Yeah, thank you, Steve. Steven, I really appreciate it. It’s been a labor of love to put this together. you know, luckily you’ve been sleeping well for like many years now because you had this device. The wild thing is like in a traditional care model, if somebody went to their concierge medicine physician and had a sleep symptom or a consequence of a sleep disorder like a fib or recent stroke,

hypertension and they wanted to get

a sleep study, a sleep health examination, see a sleep doctor, get started on treatment. That journey is still like many, many months. And like what we strive to do is like within a month or two, like get them tested, get understanding of what’s going on, give them some very specific recommendations so that they can see how their sleep is changing over time. And if they need a CPAP, we’ll mail it to your house, find you the right mask, find you the right pressure and get

everything dialed in as quickly as possible. And I think that’s like, to me is super exciting, is to take someone who is completely, who is symptom aware, but problem naive, like diagnosis naive, and like take them on a really quick journey to optimizing their sleep in a matter of a couple of months.

Steven Schwartz (19:59)
Right, and so you had told me before that you partner with many different concierge doctors, DPC doctors, traditional insurance-based primary care doctors. Currently, can you tell us, generally speaking, how many folks you’re working with across the country as far as scope?

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (20:18)
hundreds.

Steven Schwartz (20:19)
Awesome. Yeah,

that’s great. So before I forget, for physicians or office managers who are listening to this podcast, if they would like to speak with you personally to learn more about Empower Sleep, or even I would strongly recommend for them to sign up with you and try it out themselves for 30 days just to see it from

what a patient’s point of view would look like. Do you have a special offer for physicians to really just try this out for themselves?

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (20:59)
Yeah, I totally. Please ping me on LinkedIn or just go to our website. It’s empowersleep.com. You can call in or send an email. I screen almost still many of the emails that come in. So just let them know that you heard about this on your podcast and we’ll get them set up for a complimentary.

30-day sleep study. And you know, the idea here really is that in med school, in residency, we as physicians are not really up-skilled on a lot of the core things that are required to be, to understand, to keep people healthy. Exercise, nutrition, and sleep. And we’re not really taught, I think in…

last I looked at this, you get like three to four hours of like education on sleep and that’s it. And when we allow like doctors to do a sleep study for themselves, it’s kind of like what your experience was like, wow, like I, this is really interesting. Now that I can, now that I’ve done a sleep study for myself and I understand how my health is and what these numbers mean.

And there’s a whole bunch of educational stuff in the app to upskill patients. They can then at least start having that conversation with their patient to like talk to them about sleep because if physicians can improve the sleep of themselves, their family members, then these things naturally trickle down to their patients and it just becomes a part of their practice. So please, yeah, I would love for you to understand your sleep and would love for the opportunity to help you do that.

Steven Schwartz (22:45)
Yeah, that’s great. I really agree that for a physician to wholeheartedly recommend your company to one of their precious patients, they should do it themselves. become a believer, as I did. I just have to wear this ring and then click the app and go to sleep. That’s it. Take it off in the morning. That’s it. It was very, very easy to use and really opened my eyes.

to the vast amount of information that can be captured and not just the technical capturing of that data, but having medical professionals read through that and give you actionable advice on how to improve things. And for me, at the end of the day, I can get the kids to sleep and, you know, the kitchen cleaned up. And finally, you plop down in front of the television, my wife and I.

It’s kind of funny. We like watching the medical dramas like New Amsterdam. And right now we’re watching The Resident. And it’s fun to just sit down and watch a TV show at the end of the night, click it off and go to bed. And one of your medical professionals told me, all right, if that’s what you’re doing, but take a half an hour, take 45 minutes, read a book or just, you know, have some transition time.

between turning off that television and actually going to sleep to allow your brain to go, you know, somehow clear out the blue light or whatever from the television. And I’d heard that before, like, don’t use your phone and then turn it off and close your eyes and go to sleep because that causes problems with your sleep. So we’ve been trying to implement that like anything, you know, turning the Titanic. takes some time, but we’re trying to do better and take the advice that your team provided to help give better sleep, not just to me, but also to my wife.

And grateful for that.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (24:35)
Yeah, yeah,

it’s a really common scenario and I think like the beauty comes where you can

What helps change behavior is

allowing the patient to see how their physiology changes with that intervention. Have you ever tried a continuous glucose monitor for yourself? A CGM? I would encourage you to try it. I think they’re like a phenomenal tool of understanding your glycemic health. You can understand like a bowl of rice, a banana, a sweet potato, a can of beer, anything, right? You can understand how does this external thing

When ingested, how does that manipulate my physiology? How does exercise manipulate my physiology? And when you do that, it becomes a lot easier to make educated decisions because you have the objective data of how something is impacting your health. And the beauty of like longitudinal tracking of anything, whether that’s sleep or glucose or

any of these things when you can see that. Hey, when I abstain from watching television for a week, my fragmentation of sleep is 30 % less. Well, that’s really powerful, right? Because like now you for the next as long as you live, you can possibly continue to ingrain that behavior because your fragmentation of sleep is less. And if your fragmentation of sleep is less and you have even if it’s 20 % more

10 % more deep sleep, how is that going to impact the decisions that you make during the day? For yourself, for your family, for the people that you take care of. How does that impact the likelihood of developing cognitive impairment decades from now? I mean, we don’t really know, but what physiologically makes a lot of sense is that if something is healthy and physiologic,

then things will continue to sort of stay in that direction over a period of time. And the beauty of these sensors is that they’re super easy to use. They give us a wealth of information and they really help change behaviors when you can see how your external, how your physiology interacts with the external environment.

Steven Schwartz (27:07)
I remember 10 years ago where two in the afternoon I would be exhausted and just feel like I’ve got to close my eyes for 20 minutes. I’m exhausted. Or driving and you stop at a traffic signal, a red light, and feel like you’re going to fall asleep. It’s like, this is ridiculous. Why is this happening? And my wife had heard me sleeping. And she says, you’re holding your breath for a long time.

while you’re sleeping. I’m like, I am. had no idea because I’m sleeping. And so she had encouraged me to get the sleep study, and I’m really glad she did because I think my health and general wellness and certainly energy level has been dramatically better since I started using the CPAP every day. And so I’m perfect walking, talking example of it can work. And I really do hope that.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (27:54)
Yeah, cool.

Steven Schwartz (28:04)
people hearing this podcast will reach out to Empowersleep.com to you personally get set up with a 30-day trial run essentially for their own health and knowledge and experience. And then from there, obviously, you know, we’re all in this together to improve health care for Americans and eventually, you know, across the whole planet, improving health care and better outcomes for the patients and also less stress.

and happier doctors and less burned out for the doctors. So I’m glad to do my part in this and I’m really glad you’re doing your part too.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (28:41)
Yeah, thank you, Steven. It’s been a pleasure. And then, you know, we’re learning. We’re always trying new things and improving what we do. So very receptive to feedback. And a lot of what we do is really driven by the patients and the doctors that we work

Steven Schwartz (28:57)
Or, you know, speaking of that and always wanting to improve part of my business is concierge medical marketing, where we help concierge and DPC physicians and their offices achieve their goals with effective digital marketing. And so the three programs that we offer just quickly here are number one.

For transitions, if a physician has a traditional insurance-based practice with 3,000 patients and they want to transition to a concierge or DPC, we can help do the proper advertising and marketing to those folks to help transition them over as well as bringing in additional folks. The second program is growth. That’s if someone has a practice and is not yet at their panel size that they wish to reach, 250, 300, whatever it might be. We do the marketing to help.

bring those folks in by education and whatnot. And third, we call nurture. And that’s where you have a full practice, maybe you have a waiting list, and you need to nurture your existing patients. Keep in touch with them with emails or text messages or with maybe events that you have at your office to help people get together and have some wine and cheese and

shrimp or something and some music, but to learn medical topics on how people can de-stress or eat better or sleep better, whatever it might be. We can help with all of these three types of areas of practice. And toward this end, I’ve written a book called The Definitive Guide to Winning with Digital Marketing for Concierge Medical Practices. And the book is absolutely free to anybody who would like to get a copy.

simply go to our website conciergeMD.marketing, scroll down the homepage a little bit till you see a copy of the book, enter your email address and hit the go button and the system will send you a link where you can download that PDF, read it with my compliments. There’s tons and tons of great information in there that you can use to help grow your practice or transition or nurture, whatever it is. And obviously, if you need our help or if you need explanation or want to dig a little deeper, please feel free to give me a call.

My number is 772-304-2420. And again, the website is conciergemd.marketing. But back to Sahil, thank you for your time. Thank you for your passion for sleep and for making your practice be able to help so many physicians and their patients sleep better and have healthier, happier lives because of it. Again, thank you.

Sahil Chopra | Empower Sleep (31:40)
So thank you for having me and I’m glad we had a chance to chat today.

Steven Schwartz (31:41)
we have a chance to help there.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, folks, we’re going to sign off for now. I’m grateful to have you along on the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, and we’ll see you on our next episode. Take care, everyone.