For Joel DeJong, founder and president of Sportlink, Inc., a company that fuses sports and medicine to battle sudden cardiac death in athletes, the realization that something needed to change occurred while watching the news in college. “I was sitting on the couch and I saw a news segment about a student athlete dying from sudden cardiac arrest,” he remembers. “It triggered a memory I had of a classmate in junior high that had died on the playing field in the same manner. I couldn’t believe that so much time had passed and kids were still dying from the same conditions.”
The conditions that DeJong was witnessing were those that lead to sudden cardiac death (SCD). Also known as the “silent killer,” because of its asymptomatic nature, SCD has been widely misunderstood, mislabeled, and just plain missed over the course of the last twenty years. After hitting the media’s radar in 1990, when Hank Gathers, a star basketball player at Loyola Marymount University, dropped dead during a West Coast Conference tournament game, the condition again garnered the media’s spotlight—this time nationally—after Boston Celtics star, Reggie Lewis, collapsed and died during an off-season practice in 1993.
Doctors initially maintained that the media attention created by these and similar events was incorrectly influencing the public’s perception as to the frequency of SCD. As the media and public began to ask doctors why such conditions were going undetected, medical professionals tried to pacify the public by issuing reports that labeled the results “rare.” To that end, statistics have varied widely—ranging from 1: 300,000 to 1: 23,000.
When asked about the numbers, DeJong says, “Midwest Heart Foundation puts out a statistic that we feel is much closer to revealing the true scope of the problem. Seven thousand young people under the age of eighteen die from undetected heart conditions each year. When you do the math, that’s almost twenty kids a day that are dying.”
DeJong is right. Midwest Heart Foundation also says that young athletes suffer sudden cardiac death at a rate of two to three times higher than their less active peers. According to Midwest Heart, there are an estimated twenty million teenagers currently participating in athletics.
Through Sportlink, DeJong embarked on a mission in 1999 that had the genuine potential to save lives. The business model was initially built around getting buy-in from the school systems. Sportlink would bring a number of staff members into a school on a predetermined date and set up in the school’s gymnasium. Using stations that each addressed a specific component set forth in the PPE monograph—a compendium of state-of-the-art guidelines for performing pre-participation physicals for student athletes—Sportlink would put the students through a highly effective sports physical. This process was developed collaboratively by a number of well-known and respected organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians. The difference, however, was that Sportlink added a snapshot echo to the mix, effectively making the screening the most comprehensive exam on the market (outside of a hospital) for identifying undetected heart conditions.
Driven by the core values that DeJong had built Sportlink upon, the endeavor prospered. “I wanted to build a company that addressed a tangible need for our communities, and connected the dots between expertise, screening equipment, facilities, and cost,” he assures. “I also wanted to bring the human experience back into the equation, so that the screenings weren’t contingent on the broken insurance model.”
The broken insurance model that DeJong refers to is something that most of us are all too familiar with. Typically, our decision to see, or not see, a medical doctor is driven by what our insurance will allow us to do. We have to navigate the massive insurance maze just to see what doctors are in our network and how much it will ultimately cost us. Our decisions aren’t based on standards of care; rather, they are based on what we can afford—an unfair compromise when it comes to our health.
Driven by the need for change, DeJong continued to push the company forward. By 2005, Sportlink had reached its high point—with sixty schools participating. But even as it enjoyed early success, the market shifted and things began to change. The Sportlink business model, as well as the company, found itself in a transitional time. Its fundamental purpose had never wavered—providing an affordable heart screening to every child—but the competitive landscape had.
As the school business began a gradual but steady decline, Sportlink began development on a new service—the Sportlink Heart Exam. The exam is a fully directed echocardiogram, 12-lead EKG, blood pressure analysis, and comprehensive health history review packaged into one non-invasive screening, with a purchase price of $249.99. Boasting a higher than normal sensitivity rate of 90% (the standard doctors office visit has a detection rate of 3-6%), the heart exam offers a streamlined service that families can afford. New Health Services, an organization that provides medical cost comparisons across the nation, puts the price tag on just the echocardiogram alone at $1,550.
Sportlink now partners with a number of the nation’s leading cardiology offices so parents and kids can have access to a world-class cardiovascular screening and get a comprehensive evaluation of their child’s heart. Sportlink believes that with the correct technology, and a vast network of committed professionals available to perform the Sportlink Heart Exam, they can save the lives of our community’s sons, daughters, and friends.
Visit their website today, set up a consultation, or ask your physician about the benefits of the Sportlink Heart Exam. With so many young people in Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia participating in sports at an increasingly competitive rate and level, it would be a shame to think that they didn’t have access to an innovative method of detecting and/or preventing sudden cardiac death at such an affordable price compared to standard medical procedures. It really is a no-brainer. Check out SportlinkHeart.com and encourage your child’s school to contact them, as well. You have nothing to lose, and needless to say, everything to gain.
Let’s bring this incredibly easy, effective, and affordable healthcare option to the tri-state area today!
— Editor’s note: Tim has been a busy man and we’d like to reward him for it. You can easily follow him on Twitter @TimHillegonds. You can enjoy his Shady Dreams at timhillegonds.com/blog/. And check out his latest book: Vodka Flavored Tears. For additional links and more information, click here. YEP certainly gets fired up when people put in the work. Tim is doing just that.
Important topic. I passed your article along to our Asst. Superintendent.