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Project ECHO: A Revolution in Medical Education and Care Delivery
Project ECHO is a lifelong learning and guided practice model that revolutionizes medical education and exponentially increases workforce capacity to provide best-practice specialty care and reduce health disparities. The heart of the ECHO model™ is its hub-and-spoke knowledge-sharing networks, led by expert teams who use multi-point videoconferencing to conduct virtual clinics with community providers. In this way, primary care doctors, nurses, and other clinicians learn to provide excellent specialty care to patients in their own communities.
People need access to specialty care for their complex health conditions.
There aren't enough specialists to treat everyone who needs care, especially in rural and underserved communities.
ECHO trains primary care clinicians to provide specialty care services. This means more people can get the care they need.
Patients get the right care, in the right place, at the right time. This improves outcomes and reduces costs.
How does it work?
Project ECHO links expert specialist teams at an academic hub with primary care clinicians in local communities. Primary care clinicians, the spokes in our model, become part of a learning community, where they receive mentoring and feedback from specialists. Together, they manage patient cases so that patients get the care they need. Although the ECHO model makes use of telecommunications technology, it is different from telemedicine.
ECHO is Expanding
The ECHO model is expanding—across diseases and specialties, across urban and rural locales, and across different types of delivery and payment systems.
Changing the World, Fast
539,000
travel miles were saved for New Mexico patients in 2009 alone, because they could now receive care in their communities. This reduced travel costs, wait times, and avoidable complications.
24
clinics in New Mexico now provide hepatitis C treatment through Project ECHO. Prior to Project ECHO, only two clinics in all of New Mexico treated hepatitis C, which affected an estimated 30,000 people.
Over 110 partners world-wide
Project ECHO has now been implemented by 112 partners – 68 in the U.S. and 44 internationally. The ECHO system is operating in 21 countries, covering more than 55 complex conditions and problems.
Beyond Medicine
ECHO is not only used in medicine. The University of Wyoming is using the ECHO model to share expertise in assistive technologies with special education teachers in public schools.
Quality Treatment
Clinicians trained and mentored through ECHO provide treatment that is equal in quality and effectiveness to treatment provided by specialists at a university.
Nearly 300
clinicians in New Mexico are certified to prescribe buprenorphine—the best-practice treatment medication for opiate addiction. Before Project ECHO, fewer than a dozen clinicians in New Mexico were certified.
Get Involved
Interested in bringing Project ECHO to your practice? If you are in New Mexico, you can join a teleECHO clinic. If you are elsewhere, join our Introduction and Orientation events or learn more about what it takes to replicate ECHO.