The third Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit ended June 29 at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky., with a commitment to create a national rider injury database, something that Keeneland president and CEO Nick Nicholson said was his No. 1 priority going into the meeting.

"I think we need it, and I was going to be very disappointed if we didn't get (an agreement to pursue) it," said Nicholson, whose track has hosted all three of the summit's editions. "Personally, I think our No. 1 objective should be to prevent injuries to people, so we've got to track how and where they are getting hurt. Our No. 2 priority is the safety of the horses, and it all goes together. If you provide safer racing facilities for horses, one of the consequences of a safer racing environment for horses is fewer injuries to people."

The national Equine Injury Database is up and running, and the latest information provided by that effort was presented at the summit. According to Dr. Mick Peterson, who was the Racing Equipment and Safety group's leader, the approach to developing the Rider Injury Database will be similar to that used in the creation of the Equine Injury Database.

"Because of all the technical issues and privacy concerns, setting up a rider injury database is quite a large undertaking," Peterson said. "We'll roll it out as we begin to understand the issues at each stage. What I think is the process that will likely will occur is that we will find a few tracks that already have a proccess (to track rider injuries) in place, we'll adopt their methods, and then we'll expand it outward. Think about how the Equine Injury Database evolved. It started out with paper forms being faxed in to one person who typed the information into an Excel spreadsheet and now it's an online form with a tablet computer. I think we are going to see the same sort of progression with the Rider Injury Database