Project ECHO Standardizes Best Practices

From MD News.com A very nice piece on Project ECHO and it's director, Sanjeev Arora, MD. The program has been a great success in bringing Hepatitis C best practices to remote and rural areas. It appears that the model is being explored for other disease states.

Project ECHO Standardizes Best Practices

By: Conner Armstrong
Thursday, November 17, 2011

Best practice care rarely reaches rural healthcare markets. Project ECHO changes that.

In 2004, less than 5% of the approximately 28,000 New Mexico residents with hepatitis C had been treated—none of them by a local primary care physician. Project ECHO reached out to this market by developing a method for training local medical teams in hepatitis C treatment. Using web-based software and teleclinics, ECHO effectively provides medical staff in underserved areas with an experiential version of distance learning.

“Based on our studies, clinicians who we helped were as capable as specialists,” observes Sanjeev Arora, MD, FACP, FACG, director of Project ECHO. “After we had so much success with managing hepatitis C, we’ve recycled the ECHO model to deal with other diseases.”

Expanded ECHO
Project ECHO now services more than 300 sites across New Mexico by offering best practice care to patients with asthma, HIV, diabetes, and several other diseases. Factors such as case numbers, management complexity, and likelihood of societal impact help determine which diseases Project ECHO targets.

Fringe Benefits
“The potential benefits of the ECHO model are both immediate and long-term,” Arora says. “We could be changing the design of health care for years.”

Some of the benefits include:

*expansion of services to rural areas
*integration of public health into the treatment paradigm
*marketable rural workforce
*reduced testing and travel costs
*support for the medical home model