Kansas City, Mo. ? Nine-year-old Gabe Mathews felt a little funny before taking a test last week. So he went to the school nurse, who discovered the diabetic boy’s blood sugar was very low.

Later that night, his mother, Michele Kilo, tested him again and found it was now much too high.

Such swings are common for children with Type I diabetes, the rarer form of the disease, which affects 206,000 people under the age of 20. But Kilo, a physician at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, said Wednesday that it would be nice to be able to quickly share those readings with Gabe’s physician so that together they could determine a cause and prescribe changes in his insulin regimen.

“As you can imagine with any family’s lifestyle, you’re always on the move,” she said.

Web connection

Cerner Corp., one of the country’s largest providers of electronic health care records, on Wednesday unveiled a $25 million plan to provide a Web-based system connecting all children with Type I diabetes with their physicians for free.

The effort, to last 10 years, will establish personal health care records for each child, which can be accessed by the patient’s family and health care provider through a secure Web site. It will record glucose levels, carbohydrate intake and insulin injections, cutting down on the need for clinical visits and possibly allowing patients themselves to head off problems.

“We’re really trying to prove the value of connecting a person with a chronic medical condition with their physician,” said Neal Patterson, the chief executive of Kansas City-based Cerner. “We think that’s one of the most valuable things information technology can do.”

Experimental project

Besides helping diabetics, however, the campaign is also an early experiment in the burgeoning area of electronic health records.

The Bush administration has set a goal that most Americans will have computerized health records available within 10 years. Supporters contend electronic records avoid medical mistakes, improve care and are cheaper to store than paper records.

Patterson said that by the time the diabetes program is over, he expected the market for such online, on-demand records to be in full swing — and for Cerner to have staked its place in that market.

“We’re not trying to be a consumer brand in the near term,” he said. “But we are glad that it will get us greater recognition in the community. We think there’s huge value in this project and the doctors will see that, and we think it’s a great thing to do.”

Children’s Mercy is one of 16 hospitals and health centers around the country that has agreed to participate in Cerner’s program and recommend it to patients.

Patients and doctors will not need any additional equipment or software other than an Internet connection. Patterson said “proxies,” such as libraries and school health clinics, could be used for children whose households don’t have Internet access.

Doctors in favor

Dr. Nathaniel Clark, national vice president for clinical affairs of the American Diabetes Assn., said it wasn’t known how many children the program could ultimately serve. But he said improving communication between patient and doctor was critical for such a disease, since delays in treatment can quickly snowball into emergencies that can lead to complications such as blindness and amputation.

“There’s the potential of improving the quality of care and the use of the health system,” he said.

Dr. Kurt Midyett, an endocrinologist at Children’s Mercy, said he believed doctors would get on board with the program, if not from their own interest in the project but the demand from patients.

“I think this is something that can generate a life of its own,” Midyett said.