Partnerships and Collaboration
This model program, called Project ECHO, leverages technology to share knowledge across a wide network of disease-specific consultants and rural healthcare teams. In regular virtual meetings program participants learn from and alongside each other while also providing direct patient care, with the ultimate goal of gaining crucial knowledge on how to assess and treat common medical conditions with complex treatment plans. The pilot program, run by Dr. Sanjeev Arora in his liver clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, saw the hepatitis C clinic wait list decrease from 8 months to 2 weeks, proving the efficacy of this innovative “telementoring” approach to tackling medical management knowledge gaps in rural and underserved areas. In 2016 Congress passed the “ECHO Act,” enriching Project ECHO as a national model for Health care collaboration in rural and underserved areas.