Injury surveillance

What is injury surveillance?

Sports leagues such as the NFL and Premier League carry out injury surveillance programs every season. These programs can be focused on the events around injuries, elements of the injuries themselves, or entire body parts. In order to carry out these programs additional questions need to be filled out by the practitioners creating and maintaining these injuries. In previous EMRs these leagues would have to have these questions added to all injuries and labelled as optional, meaning the practitioners would have to know which injuries to fill them out for or fill them out for all injuries, adding to the work that they had to do.

Why was this so important to get right for our league customers?

With the launch of performance medicine Kitman’s internal staff were able to add these questions when triggered by certain injury details however it was limited and built by back end engineers with a minimal UI to save time. This caused our internal staff hours of work manually creating these rulesets so we wanted to not only improve this workflow but empower our customers to create these rulesets themselves within performance medicine.

How did we go about this and what was so complex?

Throughout the research project and following customer conversations we had multiple interviews with practitioners from clubs and leagues about this topic, what they wanted to track, how they wanted to track it, how often it changed, how they developed research questions, the partnering universities they worked with, and want they couldn’t do in their previous systems. So to start this project we spoke to the internal experts in Kitman who worked with our customers on these surveillance projects and created the conditional questions in the system. I got them to talk me through some of the rulesets they had created, the problems they had faced, and watched as they created some conditional questions, noting their frustrations. I spent some time working through creating the rulesets myself and noting any other issues I faced.

Location

As with the original conditional fields it would have been quicker to build the updated version out in our admin area “console” and keep it to just internal staff. However, with a limited UI we knew that this wouldn’t fix all the issues that they were facing when creating these rulesets. There was also a feeling amongst this team of internal users that their needs came second to our customers, as they had a large league migration coming up with 92 clubs to create these surveillance programs for we wanted to fix this and give them the best experience possible. Moving this area into the customer facing performance medicine platform also allowed us to future proof for allowing customers to create these rules themselves someday.

Creation Format

Ensuring that the users could create complex flows but still follow them visually was key. I looked at a number of different form builders and flow creators for inspiration, trying a couple of different options but favouring the more traditional form builder style that I created in the Return to Play area as we would be able to reuse that structure. As engineering began speccing the project out we realised to accommodate more complex layers of conditions we would need to allow the side area with the list of conditions to be collapsable. Testing this with users was favourable so we proceeded with building it.

Squad and Org Management

Another issue in the original version of conditional fields was that once it was on for an org it was on for all squads within this org. This meant that under 9s teams in the academy were being asked Premier League level injury surveillance questions and vice versa. In addition, there was no way of setting up injury surveillance questions for multiple teams as once meaning that for certain leagues our internal staff were having to create the same injury surveillance questions in 92 different organisations. We needed to solve both of these problems and did so using a similar page structure to the creation area.