Professional Sports
From Baseball to the Operating Room
Sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball performance, originated in the 1970s as a way to move beyond traditional statistics and uncover deeper insights into player performance and team strategy. Popularized by the "Moneyball" era, this data-driven approach revolutionized decision-making in professional sport. Since then, data-driven performance analytics have reshaped elite sports from tennis, with point-by-point video analysis, to football’s use of GPS and biometric tracking to optimize training and tactics. Today, the core principles of sabermetrics: (i) objective measurement, (ii) performance analytics, and (iii) continuous feedback are now being applied in healthcare to evaluate surgical skill, team dynamics, and cognitive load, with the goal of improving clinical performance and patient outcomes.
Surgeons as High-Performance Athletes
Professional tennis players receive integrated feedback on their technical, tactical, mental, and physical performance. This international collaboration translates those elite performance strategies into the operating room, applying cutting-edge sports science to enhance surgical team performance. In partnership with the U.S. Tennis Association and top academic medical centers, including Michigan Medicine, Mayo Clinic, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, we investigate the behavioural and physiological factors that drive excellence in high-stakes surgery. Our goal is to develop and validate a multidomain performance index tailored to cardiothoracic surgeons.
Funded by NIH grant: R01HL175879.
