The Athlete as End User: Rethinking Sports Medicine System Design

There’s a specific realization that eventually hits every sports medicine director or medical coordinator. It usually happens late at night while replaying the day’s decisions, or right in the middle of a game-day injury scenario: Our current system isn’t working.

It is rarely because the staff isn’t trying hard enough, and it’s almost never because clinical knowledge is lacking. The failure is usually in the infrastructure beneath the care delivery. I’ve spent the early part of my career working in professional baseball, ranging from the Minnesota Twins' medical staff to helping build sports medicine practices in Florida. After treating over 500 professional athletes, I’ve come to understand that effective healthcare systems cannot be built on assumptions. There needs to be systems, checkpoints and feedback loops. You cannot engineer a solution until you truly understand the problem: the daily grinding pain points that make your end users’ jobs harder, whether that is your sports medicine tram or the athlete itself.

Too often, we try to solve for a specific problem or bottleneck when we should be solving "user experience problems." The most sophisticated clinical protocol becomes useless if the user journey required to access it is broken.

Something to think about…

Injury management systems are often built to make providers more efficient rather than to establish athlete clarity. Documentation lives in whatever electronic medical records system exists. Communication happens through multiple channels: Slack, Teams, iMessage and email. While updates get delivered through these platforms, teams also rely on verbal communication in hallways, field/court or treatment rooms.

Even teams with structured protocols in place face a core challenge: the athlete rarely has direct access to their own information in a format they can understand and reference independently. They rely on providers to translate medical terminology, explain test results, and communicate where they stand in the recovery timeline.

When information does reach the athlete, it often comes through different people at different times. Each stakeholder has their own piece of the puzzle, but the athlete is the one who needs to see the complete picture. They are making daily decisions about their body, their training, and their readiness. Yet, the system often requires them to ask permission just to know their own status.

Most sports medicine teams have communication systems in place, but there is always room for improvement in how information architecture serves the end user's actual needs. Athletes don't always know what phase they are in, the objective criteria for advancing to the next phase, or what inputs affect the timeline. This lack of transparency can create anxiety, erode trust, and reduce adherence because users don't understand why they are doing what they are doing.

We have often failed at the most basic principle of user-centered design: We haven't always made the system usable for the people who need to use it most.

Some context…

When the athlete’s experience is poor, it creates friction throughout the entire ecosystem that you have created.

Medical staff spend excessive time on support requests on a day-to-day basis. Athletes ask the same questions repeatedly because information isn’t always accessible. "What did the MRI show?" "When can I start throwing/running?" "Why are we doing this exercise?" Every question requires a synchronous interaction, taking time away from clinical care. Coaches sometimes make decisions without adequate information because the system doesn’t surface athlete status clearly. They operate with medical blindness, causing availability timelines to shift without warning them promptly. This lack of visibility can breed organizational distrust in sports medicine staff. Performance staff sometimes receive athletes at transition points without context. Strength coaches get vague handoff instructions because there isn’t always structured data transfer between rehabilitation and performance phases. This is often compounded by medicolegal realities: medical staff are trained to guard clinical data strictly, but without a system to translate that privacy into safe functional guidelines, performance coaches are left operating in the dark.

How does this philosophy translate into practice? It starts by giving the athlete a visual interface they actually want to engage with, one that speaks their language, not just the language of the EMR.

Things to think about…

Start with user research. Watch athletes navigate the current injury management process. Conduct interviews and focus groups and ask about pain points. "When did you feel most confused?" "What information did you wish you had access to?" "Where did the process break down for you?" Don't assume you understand the athletes's needs…validate them.

Map the Day-to-Day Process. Trace the path from injury through return to competition. Identify every touchpoint and document where information gets fragmented. Find the gaps where users lose visibility into their own status or feel they’ve lost agency.

Design for clarity and accessibility. Create a single source of truth where athletes can view their current status, understand objective progression criteria, and track their movement through rehabilitation phases. Make information architecture intuitive. If an athlete wants to know "when will I be available to play," the system should surface that answer clearly.

Build feedback loops. Let athlete understand how their inputs affect outputs. "You completed this assessment; here’s what it means for your timeline." "Your pain score increased; here’s why we’re adjusting the plan." Transparency reduces anxiety and increases buy-in.

Reduce cognitive load. Athletes are already dealing with the stress from injury, performance pressure, family, money and timeline uncertainty. The system shouldn't add to that burden by being confusing or requiring them to chase information across multiple channels. Good design makes things simple.

Define clear success metrics. Track time to information access, measure user satisfaction scores, and monitor adherence rates as a proxy for understanding. Use qualitative feedback to identify usability issues.

Iterate based on data. Did athletes report feeling more informed? Did confusion decrease? Did adherence improve? The athlete experience design is never finished; you must continuously refine it based on how real users interact with your ecosystem.

Lastly…

Many sports medicine systems are built like enterprise software from 2005: feature-rich for administrators, but less optimal for end users. We sometimes prioritize compliance over usability, documentation over experience, and provider workflows over athlete care journeys. The reality of sports medicine blueprint desgin is that the best clinical solution that nobody uses is worthless. If your injury management system confuses athletes, fragments their information, and leaves them feeling like passive recipients of opaque processes, it doesn't matter how evidence-based your protocols are. The user experience will undermine everything.

www.denniscolon.com