The Sideline Is the Front Door to Care

For a hospital system, a community sports medicine program is more than goodwill. It is how the system reaches the families it serves, and when an injury needs more than first aid, how those athletes find their way to the right care. The athletic trainer on the sideline is the front door. The challenge is keeping that door staffed, consistent, and connected to the rest of the system.

The Challenge

Since 2021, Memorial Hospital System and the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital U-18 Sports Medicine Program have run an outreach program covering secondary schools across Palm Beach and Broward Counties in southern Florida. Rebuilding that program after COVID surfaced four problems at once. A shortage of full-time athletic trainers left contracted school positions unfilled. Coverage was inconsistent, leaving gaps in care for student-athletes. Scheduling and communicating with per diem trainers across many locations was slow and complex. And injury documentation needed to connect cleanly with the hospital’s own systems, so injuries and referrals could actually be tracked.

The Solution

Memorial turned to Go4 to supplement and optimize its coverage model, using on-demand PRN athletic trainers to fill day-to-day gaps while Go4 also recruited full-time trainers for long-term positions. What made the partnership work was how tightly it integrated with the hospital.

Full-time trainers were connected to Memorial’s encrypted communication network and EMR, documenting injuries and streamlining referrals inside the hospital’s own systems, while PRN trainers operated under their own supervising-physician standing orders and could use Go4’s sideline documentation to share notes with athletes and guardians. Scheduling ran on a steady cadence: bi-weekly coordination with Go4, a structured request process, PRN trainers paid upfront by Go4 with Memorial invoiced bi-weekly, and full-time recruitment supported across multiple hiring platforms. As the program matured, it moved to a 500-hour minimum contract model that counted both full-time and PRN hours toward the total.

The clinical payoff showed up in the data. Once referral tracking was introduced in 2023-24, full-time trainers generated eight surgical referrals, turning sideline care into a measurable pipeline back into the health system.

By The Numbers
  • 18,332 hours made safer
  • 36 schools receiving care
  • 15,000 student-athletes impacted
The Takeaway

For a health system, sideline coverage is both a community service and a clinical front door. Go4 helps hospitals staff, standardize, and scale their outreach athletic training programs, keeping student-athletes covered and connecting them to the care their system provides.

Building or scaling a community sports medicine program? Find your athletic trainers on Go4.