General Electric Renew USOC Partnership

General Electric extended its sponsorship with the U.S. Olympic Committee through 2020 in a deal that provides U.S. team doctors with ground-breaking technology to manage the health care of the athletes.

The deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, will put thousands of pages of medical records into a computerized database that will replace hundreds of pallets of paper records that used to have to be transported to the Olympics on a ship several weeks before the games.

The Centricity Practice Solution will put the athletes’ medical history at the fingertips of the USOC’s top doctor, Bill Moreau, and other staff. It will make it easier to keep track of their diets and determine if an injured or sick athlete is allergic to a certain medicine.

The deal, announced Thursday, will put thousands of pages of medical records into a computerized database that will replace hundreds of pallets of paper records that used to be transported to the Olympics on a ship several weeks before the games.

The Centricity Practice Solution will put the athletes’ medical history at the fingertips of the USOC’s top doctor, Bill Moreau, and other staff. Among other things, it will make it easier to keep track of their diets, find out if an injured athlete is allergic to certain medicines and determine treatment for athletes in urgent situations.

“Imagine the difference between using a club to pound on a log for communication versus using a smart phone,” Moreau said.

The GE-USOC project is a big-picture version of what doctors’ offices around the world have been trying to do for years — transfer paper records onto more accessible, less balky computer servers. The Olympic project has its unique challenges because of the more than 700 athletes on the team (more than double that when you consider the overall number of elite Americans in Olympic sports) and the worldwide travel that’s part of their life.

“Recently, we had a modern pentathlete who went to train in Poland for almost two months on her own,” Moreau said. “They don’t all travel with full-on medical staff. This allows us to take care of her every bit as well as we’d take care of someone who was working at one of our facilities. Every athlete is of equal importance to us.”