The field of sports medicine is in a state of Renaissance. With far-reaching changes similar to that of the clinical world, the sports medicine industry needs to evolve to keep pace. According to HealtheAthlete General Manager Nate Hogan, there are a several ways for that change to be realized. HealtheAthlete, a leading electronic athlete health management system, seeks to explore new opportunities in the field of sports medicine by managing and improving the everyday health for all athletes to ultimately achieve better long-term performance and health outcomes.
There is recognition that athletic trainers are in fact clinical providers, and as a result, have needs that are similar to that of a provider in the traditional hospital and clinic space. Ultimately, both seek to provide the best medical care for their patients for the best health outcomes. Today it is imperative that this recognition spread beyond the Certified Athletic Trainers (ATC) community and their representative associations and into the highest levels of the sporting organizations that they serve as well as the broader health care community.
For athletic trainers, the focus for each athlete is to assess and treat them with an individualized plan that allows them to return to play at or above their previous level of performance. But as clinical providers, their mission goes beyond a commitment to returning the athlete to the field, and to ensuring that the athlete receives the best possible standard of care.
A change in data management and accessibility strategies is critical to the success of both the profession and athletes themselves. Access to large amounts of data is only the beginning. Data is meaningless if it doesn't tell a correlated story of health and performance of an athlete over time.
The health care industry is undergoing a transformation. Big data, analytics, and a higher order understanding of how to manage populations and individuals has given us the tools to prevent and predict illness, and helped us realize our true mission — managing and empowering individuals to remain healthy. This paradigm has always been extremely relevant for the sports medicine world, where statistics and the economies of performance place undue pressures on the management of health. Knowing and understanding the granularities of health care management in the sporting world means finding new ways to analyze, predict and prevent.
To read Nate's full blog, visit HealtheAthlete.com
