Advancing Global Sports Medicine Through Two Strategic Collaborations

Cleveland Clinic’s recent announcement of a partnership with the PGA TOUR, along with its earlier partnership announcement with the Cleveland Cavaliers to introduce the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center, represents a renewed focus on global sports science and wellness. The two partnerships will provide professional athletes with greater insights into performance and recovery data to elevate careers and extend longevity.

However, non-professional athletes will also benefit from the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center's through comprehensive care for the general public. This ensures that athletes of all sports and levels will have access to testing and high-tech training equipment and devices, along with expert professionals from a variety of specialties, including orthopedic surgery, sports medicine, cardiology, pulmonology, exercise physiology, neurology, nutrition, psychology and genetics.

“With the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center, the goal is to attract athletes from all different types of sports at all different levels across the world who may be interested in their own performance insights through data accumulation and analysis,” says James Rosneck, MD, a sports medicine specialist and orthopaedic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic. “

International expertise

One of the advantages of Cleveland Clinic having a global footprint is its ability to bring together experts with a wide range of experience and perspectives.

“There are always things we learn from our colleagues in London, Florida, and Abu Dhabi, and as we gather more data throughout these partnerships. The goal will be to combine processes and experiences to translate them into meaningful metrics,” says Dr. Rosneck.

"Sport is important in driving a performance mindset,” adds Phil Batty, MB ChB, FRCGP, PG, Dip (SEM), FFSEM, a consultant in Sport and Exercise Medicine at Cleveland Clinic London. “That mindset is very translatable to healthcare, which affects everyone. Peak performance is just as important to everyone's health, whether they are a professional athlete or a grandparent who wants to play with their grandkids and have an active, healthy old age. Bringing together that performance mindset with an international mindset and data is an incredibly exciting opportunity to transform health for everyone."

Impact of the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center

Set to open in 2027, the Center will offer personalized expertise in training, treatment, nutrition and recovery from Cleveland Clinic's professional medical specialists.

Although Cleveland Clinic already uses the Center’s various technologies and devices, Dr. Rosneck says its main value is bringing them under one roof, along with a multidisciplinary team of specialists.

“Motion-capture cameras, force plates, physiology evaluation — these are all things that we already have in place throughout our enterprise, but now an athlete will be able to come to the Center and take advantage of the services in one location,” Dr. Rosneck explains. “The Center will bring together a variety of specialists, including clinicians, scientists, nutritionists, biomechanists and physical therapists, so we can really take a multidisciplinary approach to care and performance.”

Although the Center offers resources that can be beneficial for professional athletes, its offerings are not exclusive to professionals.

“The Center was created to help athletes and patients of all sports functioning at all levels,” says Dr. Rosneck. “Probably the most valuable aspect of the Center for us as researchers and physicians will be the amount of quality of data that we’ll be able to gather from working with these athletes and patients. The data, which will be accumulated and analyzed across all domains, professional to recreational, can be leveraged and expanded upon to help guide care for all athletes.”

Applying insights

Dr. Rosneck says that there are several ways this data will be used. Advanced artificial intelligence can reveal insights to enhance athletes' physical and mental performance in competition. The Center will also translate these unique performance insights to populations beyond athletes, including patients, first responders and the military.

“Having worked with professional athletes throughout my career, it is not hard to see that they are elite,” says Dr. Rosneck. “The question becomes, can we learn what specifically makes them the top 0.1%? Then, it’s about asking how we can apply this knowledge to those of us who do not quite function at that level, but who still want to get the most out of our personal performance.”

Dr. Rosneck stresses that effective data evaluation needs multiple data points and an understanding of which are most relevant. Researchers at the Center will need a substantial amount of data to be able to understand which elements are applicable to everyday athletes.

“From there, we still need a lot of input to recognize if those insights are applicable across sports,” he explains. “Those applications and eventual conclusions take time, so the more information we can capture, the faster we can get to realizing those insights and leveraging them towards improving care.”

How the PGA TOUR partnership will advance player care

Similar to the Peak Performance Center, Cleveland Clinic’s partnership with the PGA TOUR also has the potential to provide meaningful insights, which can be used to improve care. As part of the multi-year partnership, Cleveland Clinic will care for players through on-site and off-site health and wellness services. It will also serve as the PGA TOUR’s performance partner.

Cleveland Clinic clinicians and performance experts will join the PGA TOUR’s Player Performance Center, traveling with the TOUR throughout the season. The first-of-its-kind program will deliver consistent care across multiple facets of the PGA TOUR and will provide a variety of essential medical services to players. As part of the partnership, TOUR players will have increased access to clinicians and performance tools that are based on current evidence and aimed at supporting their ongoing participation in competition.

Dr. Rosneck says that while they are still in the early stages, the feedback has been positive. Players have valued the ability to have virtual second opinions for people who are not close by. These can be orthopedic sports medicine injury evaluations, cardiology consults and even internal medicine evaluations or anything else offered by the enterprise

While the sports group can provide care in several ways, including event coverage and caring for acute injuries on site, Dr. Rosneck says that’s not really what this partnership is about. The focus is more on performance evaluation, such as looking at functional movement screens, biomechanic evaluations, sports cardiology, and even dermatology.

Dr. Rosneck indicates that as these partnerships progress and mature, Cleveland Clinic will increasingly be able to apply its expertise to inform best practices for enhancing performance. While data collection is still underway, Cleveland Clinic's wide network of experts from various fields allows for the gathering of insights in multiple ways that may give professional athletes both physical and mental edges. These discoveries are not limited to professionals, though, as they can help athletes at every level and populations outside of sports.