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..

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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

 

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