Bill Moreau, DC is managing director of sports medicine for the United States Olympic Committee and CMO for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio.
Tell me about yourself and the organization.
My name is Dr. Bill Moreau and I am the managing director of sports medicine for the United States Olympic Committee, and I am the chief medical officer for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. It is a privilege and tremendous responsibility to serve Team USA athletes. The USOC’s mission is to support US Olympic and Paralympic athletes to achieve sustained competitive excellence while demonstrating the values of the Olympic movement, thereby inspiring all Americans. The pathway through which sports medicine achieves this goal is to provide three pillars of support for Team USA athletes including clinical care, Games care, and through the USOC National Medical Network.
The world is a very competitive place when it comes to sports. The difference between earning an Olympic or Paralympic medal and just missing the podium is measured in hundredths of a second and the smallest fraction of an inch. My job is to lead high-performance sports medicine to protect and enhance the athlete’s health through the three USOC Sports Medicine Clinics, and at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
How has Team USA historically incorporated healthcare technology into the games?
In the recent past, before the 2012 London Summer Olympics, we maintained paper records. These records were lacking in legibility, a poor resource for analytics, and unavailable for timely access for patient care. Team USA athletes travel the world and paper records made it essentially impossible to have one repository of the health records because there was no conduit to gather the medical records from all over United States and the world.
When we switched to GE Centricity Practice Solution (CPS) in 2012, we were driven by the need to engage healthcare technology to create a single medical record, and to provide the ability to perform analysis in regards to the prevention of illness and injury. CPS was the data repository that allowed USOC Sports Medicine analytics to become a reality. We now know so much more than we did before in regard to evidence-based care pathways and important data points that allow the USOC to really focus on the prevention of illness and injury in our athletic population. The application of healthcare technology is one large component of how USOC Sports Medicine meets our mission of “Providing the Edge” for competition through high-performance sports medicine.
What sort of criteria did the selection committee use when looking at EHR vendors?
GE has been and is a great partner to the USOC and International Olympic Committee. This EHR initiative was a great opportunity to leverage the GE relationship to the benefit of the athlete. USOC Sports Medicine requires proven highest-level security in order to protect patient data, and the ability to maximally customize our forms and GE’s CPS provided the solution.
Given that you’ve had used CPS since 2012, have you made any modifications to it to better suit the needs of athletes and their care teams?
Since implementing the EHR in 2012, Sports Medicine has made some changes to the system to increase functionality, efficiency, and output. We have customized all medical documents to meet the needs of a multidisciplinary clinic, assigning observation terms that allow for data collection and analysis. With a goal of onboarding our National Governing Bodies, we have created confidentiality levels specific to department and sport (i.e., Sports Medicine, Sports Psychology, the National Governing Bodies). Additionally, we have utilized the patient portal and DocuSign to create and distribute electronic health history questionnaires and medical consent forms. From BISCOM we have purchased eFax, an electronic fax system that allows athletes to fax their medical records into the EHR via DM Indexing Client from anywhere in the world. USOC Sports Medicine continues to research new ways to utilize CPS to increase functionality and use for both providers and athletes.
Why did USOC decide to open up the EHR to caring for both athletes and spectators?
USOC Sports Medicine’s number-one priority is to document medical encounters for Team USA athletes. We have shared how we do this with our IOC Sports Medicine partners as well as the next two Olympic Games CMOs. We shared that CPS allowed us to create one centralized database for medical records that can be utilized to also study the epidemiology of patient encounters to best prevent future injury and illness, and plan for future events. Our system is focused on the athletes, but we also register coaches and staff that have been treated for injuries while involved in athletic competitions and training at the Olympic Training Center. In doing this, we document the types of encounters as well as the assessment and management strategies.
Will the EHR offer any sort of interoperability in terms of sharing information with an athlete’s trainer or local physician?
The EHR has the capability of providing access to medical and non-medical personnel. Security rights can be adjusted to grant read-only access of charts and medical histories. The system also allows for downloading and printing of records if non-medical personnel need to view specific charts or documents. Medical providers can be given access to view athlete medical records and diagnostic testing. As with non-medical personnel, they can also be given PDF documents of specific charts and information particular to their needs.
How are you using the patient portal?
USOC Sports Medicine currently has a patient portal linked to our EHR through Surescripts. In the past, our CPS patient portal was used to distribute and collect health history and medical consent forms from our athletes competing at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The portal also has the capability of viewing medical records, emails, and appointments.
How has EHR utilization helped improve outcomes over the last several Olympic and Paralympic Games?
Since we have implemented GE’s EHR, we have evolved from a reactive sports medicine clinic that treats injuries as they present to us to a data-driven sports medicine division with the ability to leverage real-time reporting and predictive analytics to improve long-term outcomes for our athletes. For example, we now better understand the true injury incidence of our patient population, and can identify risk factors for injury occurrence based on this data. During the Games, we now use live dashboards of injury occurrence and can use this information to help align the appropriate resources to keep an athlete in the field of play. These progressions give us an advantage over our competition – many of whom still use pen and paper medical records.
Are you aware of any other types of new healthcare technology that will be implemented in time for the Rio games – telemedicine, wearables, etc.?
Advances in wearable technology are changing the landscape of sports medicine and science. What was once only used and monitored in a lab a few times a year is now broadly available in real time. Our athlete population is very diverse, and each individual athlete’s needs, from a technology standpoint, differ slightly. During the lead up to Rio, our athletes will use dozens of different monitoring devices – measuring things like sleep quality, heart rate, heart rate variability, mood states, and distance traveled with GPS. How each athlete support team views and makes decisions on this data differs depending on the individual and their health and training needs.
Do you have any final thoughts?
The USOC is dedicated to providing the best opportunities to support and sustain high-performance outcomes for Team USA athletes who are working very hard, every day, to reach for Gold at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. One of Team USA’s best competitive advantages on the field of play is the high level of medical care made available before they reach the competition. Similar to the team of providers that rally to support an individual athlete, the partnership between the USOC and GE has been instrumental in allowing Team USA to “Provide the Edge” through leveraging our mutually supportive relationship in applying healthcare technology in new and innovative ways.
Contacts
Jennifer, Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan
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