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Project ECHO

Project ECHO

Project ECHO is a transformative model of medical education and care delivery that can expand treatment capacity and increase quality by ensuring that every provider is practicing at the top of his or her competence using the latest knowledge and by reinforcing team-based care as efficiently as possible.

Sanjeev Arora, MD, a liver disease specialist and social entrepreneur at the University of Mexico, Albuquerque, created Project ECHO as a platform for lifelong learning, knowledge-sharing, and mentoring that all clinicians can engage. Through Project ECHO, academic medical centers share specialized knowledge with local clinicians, bringing evidence-based medicine to everyday medical practice and dramatically expanding existing capacity to treat chronic conditions.

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Contact

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center School of Medicine

Sanjeev Arora, MD, FACP, FACG
Project Director

Project ECHO Expands and Moves to Integrate Care

On Friday, June 14, Project ECHO announced a new national institute focused on replicating the model and the launch of an innovative mental health clinic. Dr. Nancy Snyderman of NBC News facilitated a lively conversation between primary and mental health care experts who discussed new approaches to delivering care and how new models such as ECHO are expanding treatment capacity and integrating mental health and substance abuse treatment with primary care.

Read the press release

#RWJF's Nancy Barrand: By sharing knowledge, we create new knowledge that improves medical care

Project ECHO Videos

Transforming Medical Practice and Care Delivery

Learn more about how Project ECHO brings health care wherever it's needed through a revolutionary model of medical education and care delivery.

See more RWJF videos

A force multiplier: Spreading medical knowledge, expanding health care capacity

Project ECHO creates communities of practice where primary care providers and specialists work together with the goals of gaining and spreading new medical knowledge and applying it to patient care. In the process, it is revolutionizing care delivery.

The ECHO model organizes medical education, practice, and research around weekly virtual clinics, or grand rounds, that focus on case-based learning. These sessions share specialized knowledge and best practices that exist primarily in academic medical centers with community-based primary care clinicians, who develop new expertise for providing care in their own communities.

Although no patients are seen during an ECHO clinic, together, university-based specialists and primary care clinicians in the field actually manage patients with highly complex chronic diseases such as hepatitis C and rheumatoid arthritis.

In this way, Project ECHO exponentially expands the capacity of the health care workforce to provide high-quality, specialized care to patients in their own communities. This is what Dr. Arora calls the “force multiplier effect.”

News and published research from Project ECHO

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Disruptive Innovation: Conversation with Nancy Barrand and Sanjeev Arora

RWJF's Nancy Barrand and Sanjeev Arora recently spoke about how Project ECHO came to RWJF and what makes it a “pioneering” idea. 

Read a snapshot of their conversation
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Viewpoint: Creating Centers of Lifelong Learning

In this AAMC Reporter Viewpoint, Sanjeev Arora describes how a commitment to lifelong learning through models like Project ECHO can help address some of the most serious challenges facing our health care system.   

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Project ECHO Brings Complex, Chronic Care to Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced the first nationwide implementation of Project ECHO as a way to bring high-quality, complex care to veterans across the VA system, regardless of where they live.

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Primary Care Clinicians Can Treat Hepatitis C as Effectively as Specialists Through New Delivery Model

A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates that primary care clinicians in remote villages, prisons, and poor urban neighborhoods who were trained to treat patients with hepatitis C via Project ECHO achieved excellent results, identical to those of specialists at a university medical center.

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Partnering Urban Academic Medical Centers And Rural Primary Care Clinicians To Provide Complex Chronic Disease Care

Many of the estimated 32 million Americans expected to gain health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act are likely to have high levels of unmet need because of various chronic illnesses. Models of knowledge sharing such as Project ECHO can help to meet these needs, especially in underserved areas.

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Expanding Access to Hepatitis C Virus Treatment - Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes Project

Local primary care physicians who had little skill in Hepatitis C treatment before Project ECHO reported being competent after 12 months. This article in Hepatology describes the Project ECHO model and its application to Hepatitis C treatment in New Mexico.

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Go to Pioneer
Go to Pioneer

REad what People are saying about project echo...

...In Irish Medical Times: "It was, as a Ministerial advisor recently remarked ..., a model that appeared to 'recommend itself'"

...In The Washington Post: "A New Mexico experiment aims to fix the doctor shortage – no new doctors required"

...In TedEytan.com: Project ECHO is “a case-based learning, network building, two-way, force multiplying, suffering-alleviating program”

...In Healthcare IT News: "The primary purpose…is not to treat individual patients, it’s to generate expertise"

...In Medpage Today: “Case-based learning is at the heart of the ECHO model”

...In Family Practice News: “The aim is to act as a multiplier, and to expand the health system’s capacity to manage common, chronic, but complex diseases”

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