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A promising new childhood obesity surveillance program in Michigan is in peril as the state’s financial woes threaten to wipe out funding for the 11-year-old electronic database that would house it.

Proponents of the new initiative say it holds the potential to strategically attack a leading driver of escalating health care costs by targeting programs and resources into high-risk communities. Michigan’s obesity rate is among the nation’s highest and adds an estimated $3 billion in related health problems.

By getting physicians to add common height and weight measurements to a database that already claims a better than 90 percent utilization rate, backers say the effort could become the nation’s first comprehensive statewide effort to monitor childhood obesity.

“What’s unique about the approach we’re pursuing is that rather than setting up a completely new infrastructure to weigh and measure kids and then import the data, we’re just taking advantage of two things that already happen,” said Amy Sheon, co-director of an obesity prevention project with the Ann Arbor-based Altarum Institute, which is working with the state.

But efforts to close an estimated $1.7 billion state budget deficit could end up scrapping the entire immunization database.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s executive order in May eliminated fiscal fourth quarter funding of $519,000 for the MCIR database, meaning the state also loses about $130,000 in Medicaid matching funds. The governor’s proposed budget includes no funds for the next fiscal year.

The registry since July 1 has been operating on supplemental funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Bob Swanson, immunization director for the Michigan Department of Community Health. The MCIR program runs an annual budget of about $2.8 million, of which $2.1 million comes from the state.

The BMI surveillance registry is the brainchild of Healthy Kids, Healthy Michigan, a group of public- and private sector executives, as part of a five-year strategic policy plan to attack the problem of childhood obesity.

While officials are looking at rolling the program out in phases and as funding allows, the goal would be for every physician in the state to enter a child’s height and weight. The computer would then calculate individual BMI readings automatically.

“That would provide us with a good base of data to be tracking our children,” said Shannon Carney Oleksyk, who is heading the BMI registry effort for the Department of Community Health. “There’s a need for that. There’s a data gap for tracking children for obesity.”

The initiative mirrors other efforts to track epidemics by identifying high-risk areas, committing resources and analyzing outcomes data later on, said Dr. Matt Longjohn, co-director of the Altarum project.

“We’re seeing market forces encourage insurers and providers to be doing annual BMI screenings,” he said. “This system would become a very cost-efficient way for health plans and providers to document the clinical quality that they’re delivering and help them market their services to patients.

“This will be a good tool for clinical practice.”

The state Senate recently approved its spending plan for the upcoming budget year that would give the Healthy Michigan Fund, which pays for MCIR, $5 million, down from some $25 million pledged this year. But the chamber’s version stipulates that the MCIR be funded at its full fiscal 2007-08 level.

“If what the Senate passed stays, we could be back in business,” Swanson said. “If it’s not, then I think we’re going to struggle to keep MCIR operational.”

Sven Gustafson writes about technology, health care and other topics for the Michigan Business Review. He can be reached at (734) 302-1732.

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