A Project ECHO Announcement

Last month in Pioneering Ideas, Dr. Sanjeev Arora discussed how substantive changes to health care delivery systems are crucial to achieve meaningful reform and cost savings.  Arora is director of Project ECHO, a program in New Mexico that uses evidence-based medicine and interactive technology to deliver specialty care to patients in remote, rural areas of the state.

Expanding on other telehealth programs, Project ECHO engages doctors, nurses, assistants and community health educators in different parts of New Mexico in education and training, ultimately allowing them to work together to reach patients who, in many cases, would otherwise not receive care. Since 2004, the program has enabled more than 4,000 people, most of them poor, to be treated for Hepatitis C – the deadly but curable disease that was the focus of the program's launch.

Project ECHO is a great example of innovation making an impact in health care.  We believe it’s a model that can be used anywhere there are underserved, high-risk populations, which is why we are excited to announce the award of a new three-year, $5 million grant to the program.

The grant will support an extension of the ECHO model, this time out of the University of Washington in Seattle, and the expansion to other common chronic diseases including, among other, diabetes, substance abuse, and high-risk pregnancy.

For all the details, click here.