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For most Olympic athletes, the biggest fear is not failing to win a gold medal but falling victim to a last-minute injury that destroys years of hard work and endless hours of practice. But doctors working with big data and cloud-based software are competing to make those heart-breaking injuries less likely.
The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, for example, is using a cloud-based version of GE Healthcare's Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS) as the official electronic medical records (EMR) keeper. Moving these records into the cloud eliminates the need to ship pallets of paper around the globe in order to monitor athletes' health. The technology is available at all medical posts throughout the games and at the central clinic in the Olympic Village where doctors can deliver more complex care.
"To win the Olympics you have to be the best in the world on a particular day, at a particular time, in your sport," says Bill Moreau, the U.S. Olympic Committee's managing director of sports medicine. "To achieve that is extremely difficult. But, can you imagine training for 20 years and showing up sick or hurt when it could have been prevented? Our goal with electronic medical records is helping to ensure that athletes can deliver their best performance at the right time."
Team USA successfully used the technology at the London 2012 Olympic Games and at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. The system not only helped improve medical diagnostics for American athletes at those events, but also produced an impressive array of data that helped U.S. trainers develop strategies to improve sport performance.
Dr. Moreau says the number of surgeries on the U.S. Women's National Wrestling Team dropped 60 percent annually, four years running, in part because of using the information and analytics gleaned from EMRs to influence training protocols. "That's an amazing number," Dr. Moreau says. "That is the difference between paper and pencil and the power of the ability to do analytics."
Team USA's experience impressed the International Olympic Committee so much that it using a specially built EMR platform at the Rio Games to track records of everything from scans to medications to allergies. Available in English and Portuguese, the system helps healthcare staff in Brazil better help their athletes. "Adding access to an electronic medical record is key to our drive towards the prevention of injury," says Richard Budgett, medical and scientific director for the IOC. "The EMR is going to be a cornerstone for our medical services." In fact, the IOC calls using EMR at the Games part of its gold medal medical services.
The average Olympic or Paralympic athlete has between seven and nine healthcare providers involved in their care at any time, says Dr. Moreau. Now all that data is available in a central repository for the first time. Dr. Moreau says his team can instantly look up an athlete's records on a smartphone, helping doctors be more effective on site.
By drawing on the massive amounts of data, the system also helps the medical team develop new ways to improve the health and performance of all athletes by preventing injuries. Team USA tracks 1,000 data points on each athlete and runs retrospective and forward-looking analytics to spot trends and offer solutions. Using EMR, for example, doctors helped reduce incidence of anemia among women athletes. Using blood tests, doctors can track hemoglobin levels and other lab results and then watch how various nutritional approaches impact stores of hemoglobin in the body, says Dr. Moreau.
The technology can help prevent injuries, but it has also been vital for helping injured athletes. Dr. Moreau recalls an accident at the Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi when one athlete (who competed with a spinal cord injury) took a hard fall while skiing and fractured his hip and bruised his lungs to the point where he could barely breathe and could not speak. "By being able to access his health record on my smartphone, I was able to learn he had significant allergies that would influence his course of care as well as identify the amount of anti-coagulants he already had on board," Dr. Moreau says. "Being able to access that information had a profound impact on his patient management."
Next up, Dr. Moreau is helping engineers at GE bring the power of Predix-the company's cloud computing platform-to the project. This could allow sports science teams around the world to collaborate by sharing data leading to an even better understanding of effective sports nutrition and injury prevention.
Dr. Moreau's goal is to learn new ways to improve the health for Team USA athletes. Then, he wants to share that information with the world to help everyone stay healthy and more active.
That sounds like a gold medal idea.
This content was originally published on GE Reports and is part of Digital Industry Insider.