With the eyes of the Thoroughbred racing world focused on the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont, and on the investigation now underway at Churchill Downs, it’s time for the industry to embrace a future that is based on honesty, transparency and an iron-clad commitment to the idea that the safety of horses and jockeys must come first.

To that end, I have sent letters to industry leaders inviting them to a national summit with the clear goal of driving uniform standards of care and identifying and committing to investments that will enhance equine safety. I believe it falls on those of us in this industry to lead a conversation directed at establishing a shared set of principles that don’t vary state by state. Moreover, these standards should reflect the rigorous changes we made in California when we faced our own crisis at Santa Anita.

The bipartisan Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) was established in 2020 to draft and enforce uniform safety and integrity measures. Yet three years later, there continues to be significant industry resistance to its adoption and implementation. As an industry, we must embrace these measures uniformly and without delay when we gather in Saratoga in August for the summit.

We lived through this ourselves at 1/ST when we experienced an unacceptably high number of deaths among horses at Santa Anita. Working with our industry partners and scientific experts, California became an incubator for much-needed and long-overdue reforms. Owners, trainers, veterinarians, regulators and other stakeholders agreed with our proposed measures, including strengthening medication regulations to meet or exceed international standards. Simply put, no horse should ever run on pain-masking medications or performance-enhancing drugs.

As a result, the safety record at Santa Anita, and throughout California, improved dramatically. Santa Anita has seen a nearly fivefold reduction in fatalities since 2019. We constantly monitor and evaluate our racing surfaces, safety and medication protocols to see if we can improve them through better data collection, diagnostic equipment and innovation.

The advanced safety and medication protocols were not specially crafted for California — they can and must be adopted in all states where Thoroughbred racing and training takes place. In addition, access to advanced diagnostics such as PET, MRI, and others across the country near major racing centers is key to preventing injuries. These diagnostics must be accessible and prescribed by veterinarians frequently.

As an industry, we must understand that real accountability can only come when we embrace true transparency. At present, each state has a different way of reporting catastrophic injuries sustained during racing and most do not report on training injuries at all. That needs to change. We need to consolidate and broaden the current reporting system to include not just fatalities, but also injuries at every level for all races nationwide, and we must include training.

Next, we need to adopt data-driven empirical approaches to reduce the rate of injury and fatality related to racing and training to the absolute lowest possible level and increase accountability. We need to create a new national data platform which is easily accessible by state veterinarians and attending veterinarians, so they can more efficiently access critical medical history in real time, to be able to assess whether a horse is fit and healthy to enter a race or train.

Such an ambitious data-collection strategy would enable us to harness the power of artificial intelligence-driven information analysis to unlock the root causes of injury and fatality, and more accurately tailor prevention to specific conditions. AI-based analytics require deep, comprehensive and diverse data sets to work. We can apply AI-based analytical tools that are now increasingly commonplace in human healthcare to drive evidence-based decision-making and oversight in equine health.

These changes won’t come easy in an industry, unlike other professional sports, that does not have a national league with a commissioner or a board of governors, with regular meetings of owners, player associations and other interested parties to create shared and unified regulation. That is why I believe it is time for a CEO-level horse racing leadership summit of racetrack owners and veterinarians.

Regardless of the findings that come out of Churchill Downs, our industry faces a watershed moment. The time has come for all stakeholders to meet this moment with a unified commitment to the safety and welfare of horses and riders. If we can do that, I believe we can earn back the public trust and strengthen the social license required to sustain horse racing into the future.

Stronach is chairwoman, CEO and president of 1/ST, which owns several major horse racing tracks including Gulfstream Park, Santa Anita and Pimlico, home of the Preakness.