USL expands Kitman Labs deal across Championship
The USL has expanded its partnership with Kitman Labs to provide a centralised medical-records platform across all 25 USL Championship clubs and its planned top-tier competition.
The United Soccer League has signed a multi-year expansion of its partnership with Kitman Labs, giving all 25 USL Championship clubs access to a centralised platform for managing player health and medical records.The agreement extends a relationship launched last year with the women’s Gainbridge Super League and will also cover clubs in the proposed USL Premier competition when the new top division begins operations.USL president of competition and administration Brett Luy said: “Their experience working with some of the country’s top professional sports leagues made it a seamless transition for our clubs to adopt.“The ability to centrally aggregate and manage medical data is a key driver in the continued growth and success of our medical programme.”Clubs will use Kitman Labs’ Performance Medicine Solution, which operates on the company’s iP: Intelligence Platform and brings electronic medical records into a single team and player-management system.Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.The league-wide deployment is intended to reduce the administrative burden created when players receive treatment from club physicians, external specialists or medical providers while travelling.Centralising those records will give authorised medical and performance staff a more consistent view of player availability, treatment and injury history across the competition.Kitman Labs chief executive Stephen Smith said: “The ambition that they have, the professionalisation that they have, this is the same type of behaviour that we see from the billion-dollar leagues, and that’s probably the most impressive thing for me.”The agreement also supports the USL’s plans to launch USL Premier by 2028 and establish a men’s football structure featuring promotion and relegation.Integrating the same medical infrastructure across the Championship and future first division could help the organisation standardise clinical governance as clubs move between competitions.Kitman Labs said it invested almost five years and US$25m in developing the Performance Medicine Solution, which includes more than 80 integrations with hospitals and healthcare systems.The company recently partnered with Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise on My iP, a data visualisation product designed to help coaches, clinicians and analysts interpret information held within the wider platform.Kitman Labs works with more than 2,000 sporting organisations, including the Premier League, Major League Soccer and the National Women’s Soccer League.The Championship rollout gives the USL a common medical data system across its leading men’s and women’s properties before the planned introduction of USL Premier.