Healthcare providers have struggled with data interoperability since the advent of the EHR decades ago, failing to fully connect patient information across systems. They may have an unlikely model to look to for improvement: the National Football League.
During an address last week at Forbes’ annual Healthcare Summit, NFL Chief Medical Officer Allen Sills noted that all 32 of the league’s teams report to the same EHR. Having all this player data in one place helps the league not only treat injuries more effectively but also prevent them, he said.
“If we think about all the injuries that happen in an athletic competition, yes, some of them are maybe bad luck. Players accidentally collide, they accidentally hit the ground. But there is a proportion of them — and we might disagree about the proportion — that I would call preventable. They’re preventable if we understand the drivers — if we understand the who, what, why and the circumstances of those injuries,” Sills explained.
The NFL shares its players’ health data with a third party epidemiology data science company, which delivers insights that help the league better understand the drivers of injury, he stated.
It doesn’t just share EHR data, he pointed out.
“It’s things on our game day — medical reports from all of our 30 medical providers that are at every NFL game. It’s equipment tracking. We tag all the helmets, cleats and shoulder pads that players wear. Every player wears a GPS tracking device so we know how fast, how far, where they’re moving, what the spatial relationships are on the field. We have surface data, we have environmental data, we have participation, and we have video,” Sills declared.
In his eyes, this comprehensive dataset allows the NFL to study injury mechanisms more rigorously than any other sports league.
In this day and age, injury-prevention efforts are quite multifaceted, he added. They typically require input from various experts, including nutritionists, behavioral health specialists, sport scientists, strength and conditioning coaches, performance staff and equipment managers.
For instance, equipment staff has been essential in developing concussion prevention programs through helmet testing and engineering, Sills said. The NFL has reconstructed more than 1,500 concussions using video and engineering models, mapping over 150 variables for each event. This has led to testing systems that rank helmet models based on injury risk.
The league has also rolled out education campaigns to shift players toward safer helmet choices — and now 98% of players wear only the high-safety models, Sills noted.
American football has long been criticized as a dangerous and injury-prone sport, but he believes it is well within the NFL’s ability to make the game both safer and more engaging. Sills thinks that data interoperability will continue to play a major role in this as the league continues to innovate its rules, equipment and protocols.
Photo: Bryan Allen, Getty Images
