Deploying Electronic Health Records In Sports

EHR has the advantage of providing and updating information instantaneously at any time and place, giving it a potential advantage for use in sports events and not just in hospital settings. With this in mind, we address the question: do frontline sports health providers, coaches, and athletes prefer traditional paper charts, or do they prefer a paperless version of the incident report, such as EHR?The research was conducted over three days at an organized outdoor summer sporting event, where medical providers used the EHR (Diya Sports Suite) platform to document the treatment of athletes plus spectators. Data was collected via post-event survey questionnaires from coaches, providers, and scribes to solicit their feedback on the EHR. For the medical providers, 86% of them feel that using EHR makes the treatment experience less stressful than traditional paperwork. Overall 86% of the providers, 62% of the coaches, and 100% of the scribes prefer a paperless medical record system over the traditional paper recording system. However, this study was limited by the low number (12 documentation) of patient incidents seen by the medical team and the low number of people surveyed (19 participants).A future direction for using EHR in this sporting event would be to collect enough incidents to run analytics. Studying this data will help event organizers to identify factors that may hinder the success of the tournament and take precautions to ensure the safety of athletes, coaches, and the audience.