Suckup

The vaunted Bloomberg terminal, applied to health care records, makes the health commissioner gush:

After two years of planning and a public investment of more than $60 million, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday that New York City was ready to equip doctors with computer software that can track patients’ medical records in order to provide better preventive care.

. . .

The new system, a software package developed with $30 million from the city and roughly $30 million from the state and federal governments, would let doctors do much more than is possible with paper charts by integrating a patient’s medical history, lab results and current medications into one electronic interface.

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 Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the New York City health commissioner.

Dr. Frieden said the system would provide more finely tuned information to doctors quickly than anything now available.

“This can do for health what the Bloomberg terminal did for finance,” he said in an interview.