In 2009 Special Olympics entered a record number of Healthy Athletes screenings into its Internet-based Healthy Athletes Software (HAS), supplied and managed by its global partner Health One Global Limited.

From Jan to Dec 2009 Special Olympics entered the details of 59,720 health screening examinations on athletes at 180 Healthy Athletes events from all around the world into HAS.  Screenings were entered from Healthy Athletes events in 29 countries world-wide, with at least one country from every continent and including 47 US States.

This is a great achievement by Special Olympics.  Very few, if any, other healthcare or  commercial organizations have the global reach and software capability to capture, store and manage healthcare data collected from every continent into a single global database.

The Special Olympics Healthy Athletes database is the world’s largest, most comprehensive, most up-to-date database on the health parameters of people with intellectual disability.  Special Olympics uses the database to demonstrate and prove unequivocally the huge unmet healthcare needs of people with intellectual disability in every country and to stimulate change world-wide.

In 2010 Special Olympics hopes to double the number of screenings entered into HAS.

Special Olympics
Special Olympics (www.specialolympics.org) was founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of John F Kennedy, as an international non-profit organization dedicated to empowering individuals with intellectual disabilities through sports training and competition.

Special Olympics is the world’s largest amateur sports organization and provides year-round training and competition in 26 Olympic-type summer and winter sports.  3 million athletes in 150 countries participate 20,000 events every year.

There is no charge to athletes to participate in Special Olympics and the whole movement, world-wide, is supported entirely by volunteers and sponsorship.  Special Olympics is open to all races, religions and ethnicities regardless of income, class or gender.  As a result, Special Olympic athletes represent the whole of humanity, multicultural and multilingual, from all societies and from all walks of life.  Special Olympics changes lives.

Healthy Athletes
Alongside its sporting activities Special Olympics runs a global program called Healthy Athletes using HEALTHone (from Health One Global Limited) to record free healthcare screenings at the largest 600 Special Olympics sports events worldwide each year.  This makes Special Olympics unique.  There is no other organisation in the world that seeks to offer free healthcare services to a population of 3m individuals in 150 countries.

Health One Global
Health One Global has been the Special Olympics Healthy Athletes Global Partner since 2003 and provides its Internet based electronic health record system, HEALTHone, as a charitable contribution to Special Olympics.

Health One Global offers solutions for the management of personal health and healthcare data based on its electronic health record technology, services and experienced teams to enable healthcare professionals to deliver, and individual consumers to benefit from, the most clinically-effective and the most cost-effective healthcare.  HEALTHone is used by about 3,000 healthcare professionals in 7 countries (Ireland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, South Africa, USA and UK) and in 4 languages (English, Dutch, French and German).