NFL to Start Using Electronic Medical Records System

Houston Texans fans have reason to be a little miffed at one of the team's top acquisitions of the off-season, former Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed. Maybe--just maybe--the team would not have pursued him as hard as they did if they had know about this hip issue that caused him to have surgery recently.

Problems like that may become a bit easier for teams to find out if a new league wide electronic records system gets implemented as expected.

The idea is pretty  simple.When a player gets hurt the team enters the info into a database. At a later date when say another team is looking to sign him they don't have to count on him to learn his full injury history (which can obviously affect negotiations). They'll just have to type his name into the system and see what his past team(s) have entered (since the whole league will share the system.

It makes sense. Most hospitals have something similar so that when we go from one doctor to another they can pull up a patients medical history so that they can treat the patient better (assuming the doctors are part of the same network of course).

"What you should have in this system is a way for any team interested in signing a player – with player permission – a chance to access his records so there aren't disclosure issues," the league source said.

A handful of teams are expected to try the system out with the entire league possibly using it as early as the '14 season.

Not everyone is happy about this of course. At least one agent has spoken out against it, and thinks that it will only encourage players not to disclose injuries to their current team in fear that it will hamper their negotiating power in the future. One agent has said:

"I would advise my clients to seek outside doctors and not report anything to the team if they're going to share information...But I don't want everything my player does to get reported to every team. No way."

The only reason not to let teams know everything about a player's injury history is because the agent and player want to try and hide it from the team so they can get paid more even though they know he can't perform up to par (because of the unsaid injury).

Now I know that players still have to pass physicals and teams will often have injury clauses in contracts, but wouldn't doing business be so much easier if guys went ahead and had their cards on the table from the start?


[Yahoo]