Healthy Roster Gives Parents Peace of Mind
If your child has ever been injured while playing sports, you probably how it feels to not know exactly what to do.
Was it just a bump on the head or be a concussion? A pulled muscle or a serious sprain? Should you make your son comfortable and watch and wait? Do you drive your daughter to the emergency room or hold off until morning to talk to the pediatrician?
When injuries happen, parents need advice quickly on the best next step. Wouldn’t it be great to have an expert at the touch of your fingertip?
Healthy Roster makes that possible.
About 46.5 million children and teens in the US participate is some kind of organized sports. About 15.3 million are injured each year.
“We found that the fear of concussion and other injuries from parents is overwhelming,” said Healthy Roster Co-founder Nathan Heerdt.
“There isn’t enough knowledge and help for parents when their kids get injured,” Heerdt said. “It isn’t from lack of want or need. There are professionals that fill this role—certified athletic trainers, but youth sports has exploded and there just isn’t enough coverage, especially for grade and middle schools.”
Healthy Roster gives parents peace of mind both when an injury first happens as well as afterward.
Here’s how it works:
- Coaches and parents enter injuries through Healthy Roster’s Virtual Athletic
Trainer app and Injury Communications Platform. - The smart phone app instantly sends alerts parents as well as all other people connected to that student athlete. (This could include coach, athletic trainer, and even school or league administrators.)
- Parents can easily connect with a certified athletic trainer from local hospitals via a telemedicine video chat for triage and then on through recovery.
- The app performs injury tracking and reporting for parents and schools.
Healthy Roster is fully launched in 10 hospitals
“We started with an idea that we might track just concussions, then we realized that while that was very important, there wasn’t a business model supporting it,” Heerdt said. “Just because you have a great idea, doesn’t mean that it’s a viable business.”
Through talking to sports medicine directors, hospitals, and schools, Healthy Roster pivoted, as so many of the best early stage companies do as they dig deeper into the markets they plan to serve.
“We learned about the gap in the process of dealing with student injuries,” said Heerdt.
The Healthy Roster co-founders, who all have experience in mobile apps and youth sports, followed that process and refined our solution to solve the problem of better communications and treatment of sports injuries by connecting all three stakeholders—healthcare providers and partner schools and youth organizations with parents via a co-branded athletic trainer app.
“We market our application to hospitals and schools to accomplish our goal and mission, which is to make it easier for parents to allow their children to play youth sports without the constant worry of injury or of how to handle injuries when they do occur,” Heerdt said.
