SAN FRANCISCO – A quality improvement organization and physician organization are rolling out a two-year study to find ways to promote the adoption of electronic health records and other information technology in physicians' offices.

Called the Doctors' Office Quality-Information Technology Project, or DOQ-IT, the study is being funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Partners in the study include Lumetra, a San Francisco-based Quality Improvement Organization, the largest QIO in the nation, and the Center for Health Information Technology of the American Academy of Family Practitioners.

DOQ-IT represents one of the most overt efforts to date to determine how to encourage implementation of electronic records in smaller physician practices. Ultimately, the study expects to find ways to assist providers in implementing electronic records. The effort will seek to develop a model in California that can be exported to QIOs in other states.

This month, the initiative will convene a panel of national experts to discuss how best to implement EHRs, and promote a culture of implementation and practice and work process redesign.

The effort aligns the quality improvement aims of Lumetra with the AAFP, which is seeking to encourage the implementation of affordable healthcare IT among small physician practices, said Anthony P. Linares, MD, Lumetra's medical director for quality improvement.

Last fall, the AAFP signed agreements with eight healthcare information technology vendors to provide discounts for and other assistance in implementing IT in members' offices. This initiative will build on that experience.

"We will study what roles QIOs can play in supporting small physician offices in implementing EHRs," Linares said. "We have to create tools that other states could use in a national rollout. We want to find out how a QIO could work with vendors to provide a supportive implementation process."

Another goal would be to collect standardized data from physicians' systems so that it could be collected and validated, then used potentially to identify ways to improve care, Linares said.

For the California component of the study, Lumetra hopes to recruit 150 to 200 physician practices in the state to participate in the project, Linares said. Practices selected for the study will first do a self-assessment of their readiness to shift to medical records and their willingness to make workflow adjustments.

"In addition to looking at return on investment, another thing DOQ-IT will try to promote is affordability," Linares said. "We'll be looking at any way we could provide more affordable products, such as application service providers that might decrease investment because physicians wouldn't have to purchase as much upfront."

DOQ-IT also will look at low-cost implementations that could provide automation benefits for physicians, such as e-prescribing.

"Part of the scope of our work is to look at the entire spectrum of sophistication, and a diverse group of both rural and urban physicians," Linares said.