Keeping Safety Top of Mind!

Concussion Vital Signs Brochure PDF

All sports carry the potential for injury. For student athletes’ developing brains, the risk of concussion may be the greatest risk of all. Hundreds of thousands of student athletes suffer concussions each year—injuries that may lead to chronic difficulties in the everyday activities of learning, remembering, concentrating, and solving problems.

Concussion Vital Signs® which is designed for student athletes, aligns to current sports concussion management guidelines. This scientifically based system, used as part of a medical evaluation, helps facilitate confident return-to-play decisions—while helping to protect the future of student athletes in sports, academics, and life.

Scientifically Sound and Valid

Based on neuroscientific research, Concussion Vital Signs contains seven highly respected, standardized neuropsychological tests. This reliable system, normed on individuals’ ages 8–90 years old, provides valuable clinical endpoints (brain function or cognition, concussion symptoms, concussion history, and sideline assessment) that add insight into an athlete’s brain health status. Concussion Vital Signs provides easy-to-understand information on key cognitive measures, such as memory, reaction time, and executive function, to help clinicians’ rapidly evaluate and determine an athlete’s readiness to return to play

Three Stages of Assessment

Pre-season baseline testing

• Conduct neurocognitive evaluation online
• Administer balance test.·
• Gather concussion history from parent, guardian, or athlete.·
• Complete Concussion Symptom Scale

Sideline assessment

Use mobile-enabled pocket SCAT2 for immediate sideline assessment.

Post-injury assessment

• Monitor recovery with Concussion Symptom Scale.·
• After the athlete is symptom free, clinicians can re-administer the neurocognitive test and the balance test and update the concussion history.·
• Conduct additional post-injury assessments as needed.·
• Order of test items is changed with each administration to help ensure accuracy of results.·
• Use the Clinician’s Portal to enable the student’s doctor access to previous testing to help facilitate timely return to play decisions and minimize paperwork

Advanced Features:  Adding Validity and Efficiency

Performance "Validity Indicator"

Concussion Vital Signs auto-scored validity indicators tell you at a glance if the athlete’s performance or effort was adequate on each domain area, so you quickly know whether you can rely on the results or need to re-administer the test.

Athlete health history can be completed by parents

With CVS, parents or guardians can complete the athlete’s health history, which helps ensure that you and other decision makers have reliable, up-to-date information to inform sign-offs. This approach also helps minimize testing fatigue for the athlete, which could compromise the accuracy and validity of test results.

Designed to be efficient for a school or clinic setting

Concussion Vital Signs was designed to make it easy to implement the concussion management guidelines. Test set up is intuitive and it takes only 25–30 minutes for athletes to complete the test.

Key Advantages:  

Coordinated Care

The online Clinician’s Portal facilitates collaboration among athletes, parents, trainers, and clinicians, which is vital for effective concussion management.·This unique tool enables schools and physicians to better serve athletes and their parents.

With this flexible, robust system:

• Physicians and other qualified health professionals from sports medicine clinics, concussion clinics, neuropsychology clinics and other healthcare institutions can log in to view an athlete’s concussion health history and test results in real time.
• Physicians and other health professionals can administer post-injury assessments and view reports which compare the results to previous tests to help inform their return-to-play decisions.
• Reports are clear and intuitive and do not require special training to interpret them.
• The provider, whether the athlete’s personal physician or the provider of record for the school, simply enters the student’s id codes from the CVS report into the portal to access the athlete’s records.
• Clinicians can manage and coordinate care for multiple patients from any number of schools who are using CVS for their concussion management platform.

Return-to-Learn

• Concussion Vital Signs includes subtests that help measure executive functioning, cognitive flexibility, and attention, all of which correlate closely with key academic factors and can help staff evaluate whether the student athlete needs a reduction in academic load or time away from school for recuperative cognitive rest.

Efficient, Portable, & Affordable

CVS makes it easy to reliably assess and safeguard your student athletes. Online screens are user-friendly, with intuitive navigation. And, CVS offers an abundance of convenient features, such as:

• Easy-to-use database of athlete information
• Enables you and your staff to access all athletes’ return-to-play records at one website.

Easy Rostering

• Concussion Vital Signs provides automatic roster set-up; rosters do not need to be preloaded, which enhances testing efficiency. 
• You can use this feature to:Identify and create lists of athletes who may need special attention based on test results.
• Create tailored rosters to view athletes’ results by sport or other criteria.
• Easily access and manage team rosters.

Mobile-Enabled SCAT2 Sideline Tool

• The Concussion Vital Signs SCAT2 is mobile-enabled, which allows trainers to conduct a quick concussion screen using the Symptom Scale Report during play on a smart phone or tablet.

Easy-to-Interpret Reports

• Concussion Vital Signs reports display results in a clear, logical format, showing the student’s raw score, percentile ranks, and whether the score is valid for each domain. 
• The post-injury report shows whether the athlete’s score on each domain has returned to baseline results and if it is within 5% of baseline. 
• The student’s progress is shown in an easy-to-read graph.

Cost-Efficient, Per-Student, Per-Year Pricing

• With Concussion Vital Signs, schools pay one price per student per year, ensuring that CVS can be administered post-injury as often as needed without worrying about incurring additional costs. 
• Clinicians and other qualified healthcare professionals pay one convenient fee to conduct post injury assessment but access to the Clinician’s Portal is free of charge.
• The fee is typically reimbursable under CPT billing codes.

Concussion Vital Signs Enables the Systematic Documentation of Important Clinical Endpoints Helping to Support Improved Return-to-Play Decision Making. Pearson has provided sound, valid assessments to the education world for decades. Concussion Vital Signs reflects our commitment to using superior science to support the success of all students.

Concussion Vital Signs in the News

A CBS story on concussions featured the use of Concussion Vital Signs at the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. Midway through the story you can see student athletes taking the Concussion Vital Signs assessment. CLICK HERE TO VIEW