The Rio Olympics were something of a landmark for EHR implementation with sponsor GE Healthcare providing a fully interoperable system amongst all of the participating teams.
Using cloud
technology, athletes and their support staff had their health records managed
on a common EHR.
The largest team at the games this year was the U.S. Olympic team. It consisted
of 1, 200 people including 556 athletes, coaches and other support staff along
with about 100 U.S. healthcare providers taking care of them.
In addition to its healthcare headquarters at the Olympic village, Team USA had
healthcare units installed with EHRs all over Rio, explained Bill Moreau,
managing director of the U.S. Olympic Committee's sports medicine division and
chief medical officer of the U.S. team at the Rio Games.
Through a network of cloud-based, interconnected EHRs, medical staff worked
together across the city.
“I have an
internal medicine specialist an hour and a half from here, but literally we can
consult with him through his HER,” Moreau said.
The athletes' data were encrypted both when stored in the EHR system and in
motion from point to point and backed up at an undisclosed site in the U.S..
See Also: Slipping Through the Net: Catching EHRMedication Errors
A similar EHR set up made its debut at the 2012 games in London and the 2014
Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Following the success of these installations,
the International Olympic Committee wanted to deploy it for healthcare
operations at the 2016 Games. Work on the 2016 games installation took about
two years.
Team USA designed tools and templates to support workflow for sports medicine
which were incorporated into the EHR. These were donated for use across the EHR
used across the Rio Olympics.
The team also developed a system to help clinicians diagnose cases of the endemic Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika viruses.
Source: Modern Healthcare
Image Credit: Rio Olympics