For the first time, a team of physicians at the Rio 2016 Olympics have succeeded in managing health records through a single system. GE Healthcare supplied the International Olympic Committee with health data management software to create EHRs for all athletes and patients who visit the Polyclinic in the Olympic Village.
By supporting more than 1,000 physicians and over 10,500 athletes, the system is accomplishing, on a smaller scale, the kind of integrated functionality that health IT innovators have been pursuing for years. The EHR allows the physicians to track and examine thousands of data points in real time, including imaging scans, medications, dental exams, and allergies. All of that information can be accessed on the same cloud platform.
So far, the EHR has tracked over 4,000 medical records including 1,085 diagnostic imaging exams — 610 MR exams, 345 X-ray and 130 ultrasound exams.
In the Sochi 2014 Paralympics Winter Games, there was an athlete who fell in the snow and suffered a medulla lesion, which compromised his breathing capability. He wasn’t able to speak, so the physician accessed his health record and verified that he had allergies, and was able to determine the amount of anticoagulants he’d ingested.
“It is hard to imagine that just one or two years ago, we would not have been able to access this information,” Dr. Bill Moreau, the physician who treated the patient and managing director of the sports medicine division for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), said in a statement.
In Rio the availability of important patient information may be greater than ever.
For the athletes in Rio representing smaller or developing countries, having access to the facilities at Olympic Village means an opportunity to capitalize on medical attention not available at home, according to USA Today. For those individuals, utilizing the cutting-edge services for basic checkups and preventative care is a perk to competing on the world stage.
With two MR machines provided by GE, Olympic physicians have been conducting about 60 exams per day.
The dentists have conducted 450 dental X-rays in their own right and designed 300 specialized mouth guards. Eye doctors performed 1,730 eye exams and gave out 1,410 sets of prescription glasses before the Games were halfway finished.
The U.S. Women’s Olympic wrestling team experienced a 60 percent reduction in surgeries as a result of the EHR, according to the USOC. It’s partly due to the EHR’s ability to translate data into insights and help to make changes in training and care. Despite all the advanced care that athletes are being provided access to, the state of health care in Rio continues to provide a stark contrast. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta witnessed the contrast firsthand in an August 5 report.
“Every day in Rio, we lack about 150 beds for emergency care,” Nelson Nahon, a doctor for Rio’s regional Council for Medicine, told Gupta. “Intensive care is the same. They might even die in that period because they need intensive treatment and in the semi-intensive rooms they have, people who are supposed to stay there for 24 hours — they stay for 15 days.”
A June 2014 survey conducted by Brazil’s Federal Medical Council showed that 93 percent of respondents consider Brazil’s public and private health care systems to be either very bad or mediocre.
