Sports Medical Certificates: Why Do We Still Have to Take Them to the Gym?

Italy’s Electronic Health Record could simplify certificate management by connecting healthcare documents with sports services. A practical opportunity for platforms such as Athletiko, requiring authorised sharing tools and clear rules.

Book an appointment, undergo the medical checks, obtain the certificate. Then take it to the gym, email it to the administrative office, upload it to the portal and, sometimes, still bring the original paper document.

These steps reveal a contradiction in digital transformation: a document can be created on a computer, digitally signed and stored in a healthcare system, yet reaching the organisation that needs to verify it still depends on the individual’s journeys and reminders.

Protecting health deserves better organisation, including after the medical examination.

For families with several children enrolled in different activities, managing certificates becomes a small administrative job. For sports organisations, it means checking documents, manually entering expiry dates, chasing submissions and resolving discrepancies. When a portal is introduced without redesigning the procedure, the risk is simply adding a digital requirement alongside the paper one.

Italy’s Electronic Health Record, known as the Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico (FSE), offers a starting point. Regional initiatives have already addressed the inclusion of sports medical certificates: in Veneto, for example, a 2020 regional resolution provided for the development of digital certificates for competitive sports and their transmission to the FSE. This precedent points to a direction of travel, without demonstrating that the service is now uniformly available across Italy.

The question, then, is straightforward: if a certificate is available as an authentic, verifiable digital document, why should the individual have to print it and deliver it in person?

The term “certified true copy” also deserves attention. An original electronic document, its digital duplicate and a scanned paper document are different things. Italy’s Digital Administration Code gives digital duplicates produced in accordance with the applicable rules the same legal value as the documents from which they originate. However, downloading a file from the FSE does not automatically make any PDF a certified true copy: how the document was created and which safeguards it retains must be considered.

The aim should therefore be to preserve and transmit the digital certificate with its authenticity safeguards intact, avoiding steps that turn it into a printout, a photograph and then another attachment.

For a platform such as Athletiko, a straightforward process could be designed: once the certificate has been issued, the athlete — or the person with parental responsibility — authorises its transmission to the sports centre through a dedicated service. The platform