NYC Mayor calls for city-wide electronic patient tracking

NEW YORK Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday that New York City would be starting to offer doctors computer software that can track patients’ medical records in order to provide better preventive care, according to The New York Times.

“People keep talking around in circles and no one ever does anything and it just keeps getting worse and worse,” Bloomberg said. “By bringing this health technology to New Yorkers, we are building a national model for a health care system that works, by preventing illness rather than merely treating people after they’re already sick.

The new system is being developed with $30 million from the city and another $30 million from the state and federal governments.

Among its important advances, city officials said, the system will give up-to-date information to doctors through a series of alerts, like overdue dates on prescriptions or cholesterol checks. It will share data with other doctors and provide information about the current best practices for treating illnesses. City officials hope that the system will help reduce overall costs by eliminating expensive and repetitive tests.

Two hundred doctors with 200,000 patients have committed to use the system, and the city hopes to have 1,000 doctors with one million patients using it by the end of the year, said Thomas Frieden, the New York City health commissioner.

To encourage doctors to use the system, the city will underwrite part of the expense for eligible doctors, paying for licenses, on-site training and tools to use the software and two years of maintenance and support.

Any doctor who has a practice in which 30 percent of the patients are either uninsured or on Medicaid is eligible for the assistance, but the city is also asking that they provide their own computers, and contribute $4,000 to the Fund for Public Health in New York for continuing technical support.

Bloomberg called for setting a national goal of requiring every doctor who gets reimbursed from Medicaid and Medicare to be using an electronic medical record system by 2012.