#062 Sleep and the Evidence Base of Digital Health — Prof Colin Espie (Co Founder Big Health)

Colin Espie is Professor of Sleep Medicine at Oxford University as well as Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Big Health.

With insomnia, there are two mainstays of treatment. The first is medication or drugs, and the second is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (or CBT). CBT has traditionally required face-to-face treatment from a psychologist, and can be difficult to access for patients in a constrained health service. Far easier, the criticism goes, to just give someone a pill.

Fundamentally, the problem is that prescription drugs are very scalable and relatively cheap. Face-to-face CBT on the other hand, is expensive and doesn’t scale well.

But new approaches package CBT into a digital platform or app — making it infinitely more scalable — and opening it up to many more patients.

Big Health are creators of a digital CBT program called Sleepio. Sleepio boasts the largest evidence base in digital mental health with 13 randomised controlled trials. Its parent company: Big Health has raised over $50M in funding.

We talk about digital therapy for sleep, as well as some debate about whether digital therapeutics require the same evidence as traditional medications.

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