MyNextMatch — a sports management software company — has launched its new iteration of its MediCard software, which digitally stores medical data on combat athletes, allowing national and international fighting federations to track and analyze a fighter’s medical history.
Before this program, fighting federations were relegated to using exclusively paper sources to assess an athlete’s medical history, leading to misleading and, sometimes, misplaced medical records that prevented fighters from competing at tournaments. Medical records are required before a contest in order to ensure that the competitors are truly fit to fight.
Another change from the old method of paper-only medical check-ups is that now, MyNextMatch is able to collect data that is more advanced than the figures you’d get at your annual checkup at your doctor’s office.
“The MediCard is arguably our most visionary creation of all, a revolutionary tool in sports medical safety,” MyNextMatch CEO and founder Oner Avara said in a statement. “With the help of expert doctors and medical professionals and the support of IMMAF, we have been able to execute our vision for a legitimate, safe and secure online medical passport.”
The company now collect things such as the impact of an arm fracture or concussion or the severity of one’s abrasions and cuts, information that it believes will still be available centuries from now for doctors to examine.
“You’ll see, especially in the NFL, there’s so many concussion reports coming out right now and all these medical professionals are wondering where all the data from the past 50 years is — they don’t have it,” MyNextMatch spokesman Andreas Georgiou said. “So the whole idea for the MediCard is we want to create that online medical footprint that can be tracked 50 years from now, 100 years from now, even 150 years from now.”
The medical data can be sorted very easily into different subsections; whether it’d be in a time frame — yearly, monthly, weekly — or by age or gender. For instance, if a doctor wanted to deduce how many serious leg injuries happened to male fighters between the ages of 18-29, the program is able to sparse that data down for him or her.
The first rollout of the platform will be in November for an IMMAF tournament in Bahrain.
“Our whole intention from the beginning was to make combat sports — mixed martial arts — safer,” Georgiou said. “We really believe in aiding the medical safety of all sports.”