Performance Medicine Research

What is performance medicine?

The possibility of a full electronic medical records platform had been briefly discussed in early 2021 during a related project to upgrade the medical notes capabilities, however, it wasn’t until a request for proposal process began with the NFL looking for a replacement for their previous EMR that it began to become prioritised.

During the RFP process the gaps in the existing EMR functionality within Kitman Labs became more noticeable and I was asked to create a quick view of what the future of the EMR could look like, restructuring the injury creation flow and injury details view in particular.

This RFP proved to be successful and we were given March 2023 as our go live date for our new EMR within the NFL, giving us just over less than 2 years to research, design, test, and build a brand new EMR for the NFL to use for the next 10 years as well as our other current and future customers.

Why does a medical record system need to be built for sports?

Many EMRs used by sports are traditional clinical EMRs which are not suited for or designed for the sporting environments. In traditional practitioner patient interactions it’s a one on one, scheduled block of time where the practitioner is focused on that patient, for example when you go to your GP and they open your file to have a look at your history and write notes. In a sporting environment the practitioners have a squad of athletes to look after it can be more chaotic, without defined appointment times and the time to update documentation. In addition, they’re seeing injuries and illnesses through to completion rather than prescribing exercises or treatment and being done with it like a regular GP to patient interaction, they need to follow the injury through, creating bespoke rehab plans and writing notes on the progress to update backroom and coaching staff.

Practitioners are also thinking more on a squad basis rather than individual patients, they need to be able to get a quick overview of the open injuries in the squad, the active medications, and the latest notes written as well as being able to dive into the medical history of an individual athlete.

How did we go about this research project?

Throughout the RFP process I was transparent with leadership that the concepts and designs being produced were based off assumptions and that a large research project would need to be completed prior to the build beginning. In addition, as this EMR would be used by all Kitman Labs customers I wanted to ensure that a cross section of customer voices were heard in this research and not just one big player. Our VP of Product and CEO were in agreement and gave myself and the product manager time to focus on research before engineering began.

Our first task was to create a research goal which we then used to create a list of 100 initial questions, tagged with user types, applicable sports, and org type. Over the next five months we worked with our colleagues in Applied Sports Science to identify users to speak to and carried out over 65 interviews, the notes of each were reviewed with key nuggets tagged with relevant themes and added to a database for easy filtering.

Key research statistics

65+ practitioners
5 months of focused research
Across 14 sports
In 10 countries
Amassing 1,000+ nuggets of information
Organised into 71 themes
Resulting in 13 projects (so far)
All housed in Notion

Some of the interviews I carried out as part of this research

Clubs spoken to during performance medicine research project

A section of the research nuggets table

Alongside the interviews and resulting nuggets we created a number of the personas who would be using this product as well as journey maps for their key flows in the product in order to identify the pain points and areas we could focus on for improvements. Some examples of these are shown below.