May 18, 2015
While the preparticipation evaluation (PPE) is widely used by medical practitioners, its overall effectiveness is unknown, in part because there are no standardized or centralized mechanisms to collect and analyze medical historyinformation. While some data in this population are self-evident, we were not aware of the high frequency of past injuries, the magnitude of time lost from sport, the high frequency of past surgery, and the number of participants still symptomatic from injuries. The ePPE is a valuable tool for collecting and analyzing aggregate injury and illness data in athletes, such as the finding that 11% of injuries that were reported were unresolved and still symptomatic.