The Concussion Recognition & Response™: Coach and Parent Version (CRR) from PAR has been nominated for the prestigious Appy Award! One of three finalists in the medical category, the CRR is an app for mobile phones and tablets that allows parents and coaches to quickly check for the signs and symptoms of a concussion when a young athlete is injured on the playing field. The Appy Awards will be held on March 19, 2012, in San Francisco. Finalists this year include well-known apps and brands including Mint, HBO, MLB At Bat, Home Depot, The Daily, Flipboard, Telenav and Ask.com, and growing upstarts like Westfield Malls, Viggle, Wine Road, iCookBook and SlideShark. Along with PAR’s CRR, the other nominees in the medical category are drchrono, an electronic health record (EHR) platform for physicians, and WebMD, a mobile version of the popular health information Web site. Since its inception, the Appy Awards have been designed to include all devices and platforms, and finalists are carefully chosen by the Executive Jury from hundreds of thousands of eligible apps. This year’s Jury includes fifteen veterans from three industries: software development, advertising and marketing, and technology publishing. To learn more about the Appy Awards, and to view the full lineup of categories and finalists, visit http://AppyAwards.net.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA), and partners from all across the healthcare spectrum are working together this month to spread the word about traumatic brain injury prevention, recognition, and response. PAR is proud to join these advocates in recognizing March as National Brain Injury Awareness Month. A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head or body that disrupts the normal functioning of the brain. Concussion is one of the most common forms of brain injury. The CDC estimates that 1.7 million Americans sustain a TBI, including concussions, each year. Of those individuals, 52,000 die, 275,000 are hospitalized, and 1.4 million are treated and released from an emergency department. “Since anyone can sustain a brain injury at any time, it is important for everyone to have access to comprehensive rehabilitation and ongoing disease management,” says Dr. Brent Masel, national medical director for BIAA. “Doing so eases medical complications, permanent disability, family dysfunction, job loss, homelessness, impoverishment, medical indigence, suicide and involvement with the criminal or juvenile justice system.” Good sources of information about TBI signs and symptoms include the CDC’s Traumatic Brain Injury Web site, as well as their “Heads Up: Concussion in Youth Sports” program. The BIAA “Anytime, Anywhere, Anyone” awareness campaign site is another excellent resource for understanding and disseminating information about brain injury. PAR recognizes the importance of brain injury awareness. To help address this problem, we have partnered with concussion experts from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC and the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at UNC Chapel Hill to produce two new apps designed to help parents, coaches, athletic trainers, and medical professionals recognize and respond to potential concussions. The Concussion Recognition & Response™: Parent and Coach Version and the Concussion Assessment & Response™: Sport Version are easy-to-use, inexpensive downloads for Apple® or Android™ smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Click on the links to learn more—and help spread the word about National Brain Injury Awareness Month.