Talk to sleep specialists and partners in practice Timothy J. Walter, MD, and Uma Marar, MD, and their enthusiasm for what they do is immediately contagious. This team is as dedicated to educating non-specialists about sleep medicine as they are to high quality patient care. Every month, they reach some 800 practitioners throughout Central Ohio with an informative, enlightening newsletter about the myriad facets of sleep medicine.

Walter and Marar teamed up some 7 months ago to launch their practice, Capitol Sleep Medicine. Presently, it is the only AASM accredited sleep center in Grove City, Ohio. Almost as soon as they opened the doors, the partners decided to create a monthly newsletter to help educate non-specialists, as well as demonstrate their expertise.

"We wanted to bring a little bit of academia into private practice," Walter said. "The newsletter forces us to delve into the latest literature."

The goal was to keep their image positive and intelligent in the community, while sharing knowledge and research from the sleep medicine field with non-specialists. "We wanted to communicate that there is a lot more to sleep medicine than sleep apnea," Marar added.

The Capitol Sleep Medicine Newsletter is targeted to primary care physicians, cardiologists, and ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctors. Walter writes the newsletter while Marar contributes ideas and editing. It is professionally designed, which makes it eye-catching and easy-to-read. Some of the topics covered in recent issues include "The Dreaming Brain," "OSA and American Diabesity," "Sleep and the Heart," "Restless Legs Syndrome" and "OSA and Cognitive Impairment." The upcoming issue will be on dreams and depression.

Walter says with all that is going on in the field and constant new studies, finding topics is easy. The partners pride themselves on choosing material they believe non-specialists need to hear about. "We didn’t want it to be sponsored by a drug company," Marar said. "We wanted to pay for the production of the newsletter ourselves." By investing in the newsletter, the partners keep control of the content.

So how is the newsletter doing? Walter says many physicians on the mailing list have told him and Marar that they find the newsletter informative and interesting. By all accounts, physicians are learning from it. "When an endocrinologist tells you he didn’t know that the treatment of OSA was helpful in diabetes, you know you’re making a difference," Walter said.  Marar said her husband, who is a cardiologist, was impressed by the new studies he found in Capitol Sleep Newsletter—studies he was not yet familiar with.

The newsletter is available to patients as well. While Walter says some of the information may be a bit technical for the layperson, occasionally he and Marar hand them out to patients. Moreover, patients can access the entire archive of newsletters on the Capitol Sleep Medicine Web site.

Kudos to Drs. Walter and Marar for making education a key part of their sleep medicine practice. While the primary purpose of their newsletter is to spread knowledge about sleep to non-specialists, the partners say it has turned out to be a great marketing tool, too. "A few days after we send the newsletter out, we see a bump in new patients coming in," Walter said. To read back issues of the newsletter, visit http://www.capitolsleep.com/.