HEADCHECK APP STANDS IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
Partnership will help BCHL to better track, understand concussions
A year ago, a new medical app caught Kyle Wellwood’s eye. The former Vancouver Canuck knew young hockey players could really benefit from the new technology.
Less than a year later, that app is now going to be used by an entire league.
HeadCheck, an app that allows users to track potential head injuries, is going to be in the hands of medical staff for every team in the B.C. Hockey League, the province’s junior A circuit.
In an interview this week, Wellwood said concussion awareness has “come a long way.” A forward who also played for the Toronto Maple Leafs, San Jose Sharks and Winnipeg Jets, he said he never had a concussion in his nine-season NHL career, but also knows for much of that time people just weren’t knowledgeable.
Wellwood, 34, played five years of junior hockey in Ontario and said he couldn’t remember a single instance where concussions were talked about. When he made the jump to pro hockey in 2003, concussions were rarely mentioned. He said he was always well-caredfor by pro-hockey medics, but “there just wasn’t the knowledge and data.”
But “I think that people seem to know enough now that they want the tool,” he said. And so Wellwood invested a year ago in HeadCheck Health, the company that makes the app.
Harrison Brown, the University of B.C. neurophysiology PhD student and former rugby player behind HeadCheck, said while nothing replaces proper medical assessment, collecting data along the way is something anyone can do.
“There are ways to collect data that is simple for lay people,” he said.
Every player in the BCHL will undergo a baseline assessment by team medical staff over the coming weeks to get an understanding of how players’ brains function. That data will be kept centrally by the league, and any athletic therapist can run tests on any player if there’s a worry during a game.
If tests show something’s off from the pre-season testing, the player will be removed and won’t be able to return without approval from a doctor.
“There’s no single test alone to assess concussions,” Brown added. “The gold standard to measure the injury is to look at a number of different functions of the brain,” things like cognition, balance and vision.
“You’re stacking tests on top of each other,” Brown said.
BCHL commissioner John Grisdale said the whole league is fully on board.
“We’re colleagues,” Grisdale said of the relationship with HeadCheck. “It’s going to allow our athletic therapists to have instant access to a reliable concussionassessment tool .”
The league is focused on player welfare and is aware how much more knowledge parents, players and coaches now bring to the table, Grisdale said. Having the app available to all now just increases that knowledge base.
“Our job has to continue on the player-safety side,” he said. He also hoped adding HeadCheck would give parents some piece of mind, knowing how seriously teams were taking the brain health of their young charges.
From Wellwood’s perspective, the app will provide clarity in an area of player health that carries so much long-term risk.
“It just takes a lot of pressure off coaches and management,” he said. The data won’t lie: If the player’s brain isn’t right to play, there won’t be any hiding.
Brown suggested there are other big-picture questions the league will be able to answer, like does playing three games in three days, as the league’s teams so often do, promote heightened head-injury risk?
HeadCheck will hand the league monthly data on things like how many tests have been performed, how many concussions have been detected, and any accounts of irregular behaviour.
Brown and his business partners, including COO Kerry Costello, first started working with individual teams, but the step up to providing services for a whole league was something they’ve planned for all along.
The only challenge now: Hiring enough staff for customer support.
“It’s definitely showing the progress we’ve made as a company,” he said.