Eighteen years after implementation of the North American Equine Injury Database, the initiative has lived up to all the most optimistic expectations, said Dr. Tim Parkin, during the June 29 opening session of the two-day annual Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit being held at Keeneland.
Parkin, with the University of Bristol, has consulted on the EID since its inception and runs analyses against the data.
"I look back at the original goals presented at the time, and they still stand," he said. "Those three original goals were to describe and identify frequency, type, and outcome of racing injuries, develop a centralized database that can be used to identify markers for horses at increased risk, and to derive a data source for research directed at the ongoing improvement in safety and welfare and preventing injuries. I gave a paper in Hong Kong in a conference there and the title of the paper was that this is the single-most important initiative that came out of North American racing in the last 20 years."
Since 2009, the fatality rate at North American tracks has been cut nearly in half, falling from 2.00 fatalities per 1,000 starts to 1.07 for 2025. Parkin attributes this achievement to a fundamental change in addressing the problem, to making welfare of the Thoroughbred a higher priority industrywide, and to implementing important regulatory changes to support the overall goal.
Racing on all surfaces have seen substantial declines in the fatality rate: down 46.2% on dirt, down 55.2% on turf, and down 34.9% on all-weather surfaces.
Parkin did note that while all-weather has consistently produced the lowest fatality rate, that rate has ticked up slightly since 2022 and in 2025 was slightly higher than turf at 0.97 versus 0.87, respectively.
"All surfaces are somewhat converging, and I'm not quite sure why this might be. Whether there have been changes to the way that we manage turf, or whether there are changes to the way that we manage the synthetic," Parkin said. "Perhaps the synthetics are very effective early on in their life and their maintenance is something that needs to be paid greater attention over a period of time. It's something we really want to keep an eye on."
The smaller discrepancies in 2025 between dirt (1.13), turf (0.87), and all-weather (0.97) is actually encouraging, Parkin noted, because it means the impact of surfaces is being a less important factor in the overall risk to racehorses.
On the regulatory side, the EID has led to initiative like void claim rules that cancel a claim for a number of issues that vary by state, but include a fatality, injury that would put the horse on a vet's list, exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging, or being vanned off.
Earlier analysis using the EID regarding the impact of void claim rules showed a rate of fatality after a claim was 2.2 per 1,000 starts at tracks before the rule was implemented and a rate of 1.6 per 1,000 starts after a rule is implemented.
"The availability of the granularity of data we have in the Equine Injury Database is really important," Parkin said. "That initial analysis, I believe, provided further confidence in the development of void claim rules with greater scope, greater definition, and increased scope to include other horses ending up with different things post-race would likely be beneficial. So I think it gave the regulators or those individual tracks the confidence to go further."
The EID also is providing insights into how horses who wind up on a vet's list, sidelined by injury, are later managed. Analysis shows a horse coming off a vet's list is 40-50% more likely to suffer a fatal injury within the first six months compared to horses that have never been on a vet's list. Between six months and a year later, the risk level falls to 30%. But Parkin noted all horses that have been put on a vet's list retain a higher risk throughout their careers to have a fatal injury than horses that have never been on a vet's list. The risk can fall over time to as low as 10%, but the risk never falls lower.
Parkin said this vet's list analysis underscores the need to better understand the injuries that are putting horses on a vet's list and developing better predictive models to identify at-risk horses earlier.
Toward this goal, Parkin said he had a Ph.D. student work with the Hong Kong Jockey Club to develop a system based on medical records and veterinary history to create risk profiles for every horse stabled at Sha Tin or Happy Valley Race Course in order to assist inspections by regulatory vets. The program was developed in 2022 and launched in 2024. The profiles not only look at a horse's current risk level but also how it ranked for its previous five races in order to illuminate any trends in a horse's condition.
"So, the models themselves, they account for horse, jockey, trainer, race, and seasonal effect. They're very complex models. They include a whole load of variables," Parkin said. "Inclusion of these variables improved the predictive quality ability by 60% and that is when I said: 'Okay, I think we're in a position now where you can genuinely make use of this,' and actually I would have some confidence that what we would be telling you would be valid and would have some surety about it, and actually would genuinely result in a reduction in risk."
Parkin said the Hong Kong Jockey Club model is proof of concept that a similar program can be developed for North America. Already the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority has been compiling veterinary data for racehorses from the 2022-24 foal crops. This data includes records from around 18,000 horses that have made at least one start and around 8,000 horses with at least one published work.
He said these treatment records are equivalent to 10 years worth of data in Hong Kong.
As of March 31, 7.1 million veterinary treatment records had been uploaded or digitally submitted to the HISA database through third-party integrators since the inception of the Racetrack Safety Program July 1, 2022. This dataset continues to power HISA's diagnostic tools, HISA Check and HISA Horse In-Sight.
"I think what we've learned from Hong Kong can hopefully be rapidly implemented to data here over in North America, and the aim would be really specifically to examine the strength of those associations from our prior veterinary interventions and fatal injury in this particular part of the world," he said. "So we've got a big head start there to start using those data right from the get-go to see whether the same of what we find in Hong Kong really stands up over here that then actually might provide the next big initiative for racing in this country."
Parkin said this risk profile study will start in October with financial assistance from the Grayon-Jockey Club Research Foundation.
