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For the longest time, healthcare providers had to write every symptom, prescription, patient note, and treatment down by hand in their patient files. Hospitals and doctors' offices were filled with boxes and boxes of paper files.
After a long holdout of resisting (and not trusting) technology, healthcare adopted electronic medical records to keep track of the huge volumes of data that is routinely recorded for every patient.
Not all problems have been solved with the use of Electronic Medical Records — many providers still spend an average of 90 minutes every night after clinical hours (called “pajama time”) event-logging their daily work. There are also many providers still writing down their notes and storing physical medical images.
EMRs have advanced how we keep track of all our health data in a well-coded and highly structured way. Patient information is more up-to-date, accurate, and securely shareable than ever before.
Providers have quicker access to data, diagnose more effectively, reduce errors, and have improved the quality of healthcare across the board.
When it comes to sports medicine, however, athletic trainers and sports directors continue to deal with excessive paperwork and long hours to keep up with the daily demands.
That was then…
Trainers routinely come early and stay late after the games to document and then start the process all over the next day.
Before every practice or game, coaches have to ask their athletic trainers about their teams or players. This required more time for back-and-forth communications through emails, texts, and phone calls.
ATs with multiple sites need to travel to and from as many locations as possible to triage, document, and communicate with athletes, coaches, and parents.
Technology eventually caught up with the field of sports medicine.
There are various injury-tracking systems available today to help ATs document all the work they do. These EMR-style platforms record demographics, injury reports, treatments, progress, referrals, and much more.
This is now…
What many of these sports medicine EMR systems failed to do was provide an app to help athletic trainers save time on their documentation and improve the ways they can communicate.
Everyone has a smartphone these days. And there are hundreds of thousands of apps that help make people more efficient.
Healthy Roster changed all of that for athletic trainers with a mobile application that can be downloaded to Android or iOS phones to help save them time and easily enhance communication.
Saving time with documentation
This powerful app gives ATs the ability to document at the point of injury directly through their smartphones. They no longer have to lug around a laptop from field to field. They no longer need pen and paper—which usually got blown away by wind or soaked in the rain—to document anything. By documenting on the court or in the field, they don’t need to wait until they get back to their home or office to enter everything they had to write down.
“One of our ATCs had a game last weekend with multiple injuries including a leg fracture, concussion and two or three other more minor injuries. One of the senior players made a comment to her about how much paperwork she was going to need to do as he had observed her deal with it in the past. Instead she got to reply ‘No, it’s already done. Finished it while I was waiting for everyone to shower and get back on the bus.’”
- Kyle Bangen, the Sports Performance Supervisor at Samaritan Health Services
The app lets ATs save time in the injury room by letting them document every single treatment on their phone and using the app to log-in athletes. They can take advantage of Voice Dictation to avoid the time it takes to type everything in. The PDF scanner gives them the ability to scan in anything—doctors’ notes, paper forms, any piece of paper—to save even more time.
“Healthy Roster has been a real time-saver and allowed our athletic trainers to be more efficient with their documentation, since they are able to input or update injuries and add referrals directly from the app.”
- Doug Means, Director of Sports Medicine/Marketing at KORT
Using the app to communicate better
In all walks of life, communication is key to being more effective and efficient. The Healthy Roster app lets ATs communicate more easily and, in some cases, automatically.
Players, coaches and parents can chat securely with trainers via live chat. The app can let coaches and parents know what’s going on simultaneously, eliminating duplication of effort. Before using the Healthy Roster app, a coach would have to ask the athletic trainer how the team or the athlete is doing—but with the app, the coach already knows. Automatic updates can also be sent out to all the parties involved in an athletes care circle.
“I’m in charge of many sports, on different fields, around the community. I may not have a chance to update a coach on a particular day because they are on a field across town. If that happens, they can easily check the athlete’s status on their app and determine the level of participation that is permitted for each athlete for that day. This helps keep everyone on the same page and mistakes in communication are decreased.”
- Amy Adair MS, ATC, Head Athletic Trainer at Middle Township High School
The best part about the app? Trainers don’t have to use their own personal phone numbers. Every communication is done through the app, within the Healthy Roster system. No more texts or calls or getting included in group chats through their phone number - everything is in the app.
Yes, there is a mobile app for athletic trainers…
“You have an actual app?” is a direct quote from one of our customers when they found out that we are an “app first” company built specifically for ATs and sports medicine directors.
By utilizing the app from Healthy Roster, ATs save 45-60 minutes a day because of their easy access to document, read and review treatments, track progress, log, and communicate from their phones.
This powerful app gives you more time with family and requires less time at work. You’re able to focus more on the athletes and less on documentation.
Most importantly, because the app provides so many time-saving features, you’re able to double the documentation of everything you’re doing. What that means is that every single treatment is more likely to be documented, meaning that you’ll be able to use the system to show all the work that you do. What better way to prove your value than by easily reporting on all the hard work you put in?
Healthy Roster gives you all that. In the palm of your hand.
Read Part 2 - Improving Coordination with Coaches.
And you can sign up to watch all 4 recorded webinars in our Athletic Trainer Improvement Series to learn more about how to improve documentation, communication, and get back to caring for your athletes:
If you haven’t already made the switch to our app, talk to us today and we’ll help get you started. It really is that easy.
