Improving Provider Collaboration with Sway
Overview
Leslie Mack, ATC, stays busy at her job with Southern Ohio Medical Center (SOMC). Making sure that athletes are progressing through their care plans was a challenge, especially on the weekends. “I know my co-workers like observing athletes overnight and seeing how things are going the next day,” said Mack. “If something happens on a Friday, we didn’t necessarily have the ability to see the athlete on Saturday or Sunday.” Not having data or relying on the paperwork was a challenge. Mack and her co-workers had several pieces of paperwork for each athlete, and keeping track of the paper trail was time-consuming and quickly became an outdated method in today’s digitized world.
A Team Approach to Athlete Healthcare
Mack implemented Sway at her school after SOMC saw the value in offering Sway as a resource for its contracted schools. Instead of relying on paper forms, Mack and her co-workers are now able to document their baseline and sideline evaluations through Sway’s app. “Now we can message our athletes and follow up with them over the weekend. It’s great to have realistic data, and it’s improved our documentation process in general.” Having sixteen contracted schools and over two thousand students to test, Mack and SOMC believed Sway to be a game-changer for how its staff can streamline their baseline testing process, document on-field evaluations, and continue to care for its patients remotely. This is especially important in the State of Ohio, where laws require a six-step return-to-play process. By not tracking athletes over the weekends, days were potentially being added to the timeline.
Continuity Between Providers
SOMC’s staff of athletic trainers may collaboratively provide care to the same high school, and Sway has solved a problem with continuity of care between providers. “Sway has been a blessing in disguise because all of our athletic trainers are set as administrators. We can easily toggle back and forth between our schools, which has been awesome,” exclaimed Mack. “There’s three of us that are currently checking on an athlete at one school, so we’ve been able to update his documentation daily and record his information for his return-to-play protocol.” Because Mack may provide athletic training services to multiple schools in a season, she also manages baseline testing for many teams. “I was able to quickly baseline test 53 athletes at one school and 40 at another. One of our bigger schools has about 150 kids, and the process was so easy,” Mack said. The athletes at the SOMC schools managed pre-season baseline testing better, as well. “Although it was new for everyone, the staff felt comfortable and the kids really took off with it,” she said.
Conclusion
As Mack and the SOMC athletic trainers continue to implement Sway into their care process, they’ve continued to find success. “The parents are more receptive toward what we’re doing now because we can actually show them objective data. It’s not as subjective as it used to be. We now have validation and proof that we can’t allow an athlete to return to play,” said Mack. “Sway has been much more beneficial to us in our care process, and everyone has really enjoyed it.”