Efficiency in the Training Room: Sports EMR Webinar Recap

What We Covered

Nearly 300 athletic trainers, sports medicine staff, and strength coaches joined Teamworks on March 25 for a live demo of Sports EMR. Luke Barthel and Tom Robertson, with a combined 20+ years of experience building and using athletic health systems, walked through what it actually looks like to ditch the spreadsheets.

They went from spending an hour or two at the back end of their day trying to play catch up… to getting this done at lunchtime while the food’s in the microwave.

Tom Robertson

On Sports EMR Group Entry

The Athlete Experience Starts Before They Hit the Training Room

The athlete experience is built directly into the EMR rather than added on top of it. Through a single sign on, athletes access their full profile including PPE forms, waivers, medical history, and wellness questionnaires all in one place. The system’s launch pad is fully configurable, so concussion waivers, sickle cell trait forms, and mental health screenings like the PHQ-9 can all be shaped to fit how your organization actually operates.

A dedicated Teamworks Product Manager supports implementation from day one, and most programs are fully up and running within six to eight weeks.

One standout addition: athletes can now access and download their own complete medical history directly from the app. Built originally for staff to streamline transfer paperwork, programs quickly started giving athletes access to pull their own records when they leave. Less work on the training staff, more ownership for the athlete.

Documentation That Actually Gets Done

The heaviest part of most athletic trainers’ days isn’t the hands-on work, it’s catching up on documentation afterward. Teamworks EMR addresses this with multiple entry methods designed to fit how training rooms actually operate.

Individual notes give providers a clean, templated space to document in detail. Personal note templates allow staff to pre-fill up to 90% of a standard note, cutting down on repetitive clicks for common injuries. Kiosk mode turns any iOS or Android tablet into a self-check-in station — athletes log their own recovery and treatment information as they come in, which staff can then review and build on. And group entry via Table Mode — the webinar’s most talked-about feature — lets trainers document treatment for an entire roster simultaneously rather than note by note.

The time difference is significant. Individual incident reports that previously took 10–16 minutes now take 2–5. Mass treatment logging drops from 60 minutes to under 10. Across the day, users report getting 2–3 hours back.

I caught up with a Chicago school recently – they’re dictating their notes on their phone while sitting in 90 minutes of traffic a day.

Tom Robertson

On Mobile Documentation

Automated Communication That Closes the Gaps

As practitioners document in the system, injury reports update live. Coaches can pull current status from the sideline two minutes before practice. Strength staff see weight room clearance in real time. Nobody has to ask, and nobody has to send a separate email to make it happen.

For higher stakes situations, performance alerts close the gap entirely. When a concussion is logged, the right people are notified immediately through push notification, email, and in app message. When a PHQ-9 score comes in above nine on a Saturday, the mental health provider responsible gets alerted through every available channel so it does not wait until Monday. The system handles the communication automatically so staff do not have to remember to send it while managing everything else.

Permissions run throughout, so coaches and strength staff only ever see what they are meant to see. No injury notes, no clinical detail, just the information they need to do their jobs.

The Data That Justifies Your Budget

Every treatment, modality, and referral logged in the system becomes evidence you can use. Tom walked through how training staff are now walking into budget conversations with hard numbers: how many Normatec sessions have been run this year, how many tapings were completed before March, how many referrals went to each physician’s office. That kind of documentation used to require a separate tracking system. Now it generates automatically as part of the normal workflow.

What’s Coming: Return to Play and Teamworks 2.0

The final portion of the webinar previewed two developments that will truly change the landscape.

Return to Play protocols are now integrated directly into the EMR. Practitioners can set customized phases, track goal completion, and pull in objective data from force plates (Hawkins, Vald) and GPS systems (Stat Sports, Catapult) to benchmark recovery against pre-injury baselines. Mental health assessments — PHQ-9, GAD-7, and the IPRS confidence scale — are woven into the protocol so return-to-play decisions reflect the full picture, not just physical markers.

Teamworks 2.0, currently in alpha testing with select partners, is the unified mobile app that consolidates every athlete-facing tool — scheduling, nutrition logging, strength programming, medical forms, wellness check-ins — into a single interface. For staff, it means less chasing athletes across platforms. For athletes, it means one place for everything.