In a Nov. 1 press conference outlining safety and integrity protocols ahead of this year’s Breeders’ Cup Nov. 3-4 at Santa Anita Park, officials noted the advantages of collecting important statistical information from the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority.

HISA had oversight of equine safety up and running ahead of last year’s Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland and this year HISA has its Anti-Doping and Medication Control standards in place for the World Championships. In crafting a safety net for its competitors, Breeders’ Cup officials are taking full advantage of the information HISA has collected.

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Working in conjunction with Jennifer Durenberger of HISA, Will Farmer and Debbie Lamparter of the Breeders’ Cup veterinary team, Jeff Blea and Timothy Grande of the California Horse Racing Board, and Dionne Benson of Santa Anita owner 1/ST Racing completed an initial assessment Oct. 24 of vet and treatment records associated with more than 200 potential contenders for this year’s World Championships.

After pre-entries were taken Oct. 23, hands-on exams began at Santa Anita Oct. 27 and those will continue through the race days. All contenders are subject to random physical examination at the determination of the Breeders’ Cup veterinary team.

“For the first time we’ve been able to accumulate veterinary medical records from all racing jurisdictions that are participating in HISA in the United States,” Farmer said. “So that information from any time a veterinarian prescribes, administers, or does a treatment is then entered into the HISA portal, or through a few other third-party programs that communicate with the HISA portal.”

Farmer said access to the information is critical in protecting horses. That information, which previously may have been possessed by a number of state regulatory groups in various forms, is now available through a single source in HISA. That ensures consistency in the information collected and presented. And, as they’re in the form of digital records, they are readily available and accessible.

“So by providing a list of the horses that that we have entered, [HISA is] able to cross-reference that with their database and pull all those records. Previously that was very, very labor intensive and nearly impossible for many racing jurisdictions because those records weren’t necessarily kept in any kind of usable format. They might be in a paper in a filing cabinet somewhere, so to have them digitally available is a huge advancement for us.”

Racing Safety and Integrity Briefing at Santa Anita Park. (Eclipse Sportswire)

During the press conference, HISA executive director Lisa Lazarus acknowledged the efforts being made to report such information from the industry. She said efforts such as the work with Breeders’ Cup show how providing such information can make a big difference.

“With HISA we have a lot of regulations where we ask people to do certain things and adapt to the rules,” Lazarus said. “But we also were created to help the industry solve some of those problems because we have the ability to require the entry and the submission of data across and HISA track throughout the country.

“It is an enormous opportunity to take that data and actually help some of these questions. We can always talk about what the potential theories might be for some of the injuries that we have, and we do have research on some of those issues. But, there’s a whole lot out there where we still haven’t completely scratched the surface. So we thought this year about how we can really best use that information and capitalize on it.”

On Oct. 25 HISA announced that it’s collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to apply data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to HISA’s deep and growing well of data with the goal of enhancing equine safety by analyzing the factors contributing to equine injuries and informing potential interventions to further reduce them moving forward.

“Given all of the advancements that have been made in technology and, looking at other sports and how they’ve used technology to also advance their safety issues, it became apparent to us that would be something really important to move us forward and to also deliver back to the industry.”