Last week, our team member, Amelia, had a great conversation with Shauna, a long-time customer.
Shauna had just had a team meeting where they’d discussed an article studying whether communication between sports medicine providers and coaches correlates to the number and duration of athlete injuries, and it had made her think about how much Healthy Roster’s communication features had helped her sports medicine staff communicate better with their school’s coaches.
The results of the study were not surprising - “Teams with high internal communication quality had lower injury rates and higher player availability than teams with low communication quality.” Additionally, the study found that when an organization had frequent miscommunications and members felt out of the loop or not valued, the added stress led to a potential for a higher injury rate.
Most sports medicine providers communicate via text because they don’t have an effective communication platform, and even those that do, often find it’s not HIPAA compliant (which is critical when including clinicians into a conversation about an athlete’s health).
Plus, in most environments, the athlete to athletic trainer ratio is typically quite high, meaning that the athletic trainer is so busy treating athletes, they might not have time to communicate with every coach about every athlete. Along with this kind of time constraint, athletic trainers have historically reported feeling pressure from coaches to return athletes to play sooner than a medical professional feels comfortable because of the athlete’s value on the field.
Coaches might have specific knowledge about an athlete’s mental and physical health, but without a simple and secure method to inform sports medicine providers about these insights, the athletic trainers and team physicians might be in the dark about this potentially crucial information.
By providing a platform for athletic trainers, coaches, team physicians, caregivers and athletes to all effectively, efficiently and securely communicate, we’ve created a way for athletic trainers to disseminate information without adding more hours to their workday and for coaches to be able to understand their crucial role in helping one of their athletes return to play safely and quickly.
Whether it’s through our interactive injury timeline, our secure messaging feature, or our telemedicine capabilities, Healthy Roster is changing the way sports medicine professionals and coaches communicate and helping to decrease the number and duration of injuries.
Do you want to learn more about how you can increase communication and improve relationships between coaches and sports medicine professionals? Schedule a demo with one of our team members today!