The Benefits of Data Integration for Elite Sports
In the ultra competitive world of professional sports, teams are constantly searching for the competitive advantage, not just on the field, but in all areas of their operation. Like successful corporates, leading sporting organisations are seeking to create operational efficiencies, enhance collaboration and ultimately improve on and off field performances.
Success in any sport requires continual improvement, the ability to learn and improve faster than your competitors is critical.
To achieve success businesses, support staff and athletes will collect large amount of data every day to take calculated risks that will impact their performance. The personal expertise and experience of an organisation is vital in this process. When this experience has access to a powerful analytics software which can integrate the collected data, meaningful insights can be elicited to support the decision making process and significantly increase the probability of a successful outcome.
This article highlights just a few ways in which teams and individual athletes will benefit from data integration onto an analytical platform, like SportsMed.
Extensive Data Monitoring
Through using a solution like SportsMed every interaction with an athlete can be recorded, including performances, physical, physiological, psychological testing, screening, daily wellness monitoring, injury management, supplementation, nutrition, selection, individual player plans, training loads as well as data from various 3rd party devices or systems. As SportsMed is also a secure and centralised platform it protects an organisations intellectual property, ensuring that when a staff member moves on, lessons learnt during their tenure are not lost. For an organisation, maintaining a data legacy secures their capacity to keep learning and evolving.
Athlete Protection Tools
Another key to success in any sport is to keep players or athletes competing and not on the sidelines injured. While some injuries are unavoidable, many are preventable with accurate monitoring and good management. By integrating performance and medical data into a platform like SportsMed, staff have the capacity to analyse various data parameters and highlight an athlete’s risk of injury. Used well, this powerful tool might mean the difference between a successful season or not, between a contract extension and looking for a new job, between hunting for sponsors and having a choice which sponsor you want.
Organisational Health
Few organisations have funds to spare, often struggling to fund the various departments of their organisation. At SportsMed, we understand this and seek ways to assist your organisation and reduce unnecessary expenditure. The following examples are just a few ways integrating data can assist in reducing outgoing costs:
- By recording all medical and injury related incidents, organisations have the power to negotiate better insurance premiums
- Reduce injury risk and therefore insurance premiums by utilising injury prevention tools
- Identify the best return on investment for your external medical specialists by being able to more closely assess the number of visits, the price per visit and the return to play trends that occur per practitioner or per injury type
- Understand the return on investment for various types of players by assessing contract value and costs associated with managing them through the season
While reducing insurance and medical costs cannot make athletes perform better, it may open the funding required to employ another staff member or purchase a piece of equipment that will assist with enhancing on field performance.
Player contracts make up the bulk of most organisation’s budgets. Smart analytics software will allow organisations to monitor and understand the return on investment for each athlete. While on field contributions are often hard to quantify objectively, integrating financial data will allow staff to assess all other costs related to an athlete. This type of information allows organisations to develop contract risk profiles to assist in the recruitment and contracting process.
As technology continues to evolve rapidly, sporting organisations are only just beginning to realise the absolute power of integrating and analysing data to its full potential to facilitate an their organisation’s success.
