Dr. Sanjeev Arora: Democratizing Knowledge to Reduce Disparities in Healthcare – Project ECHO

Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) is a disruptive innovation that dramatically improves both capacity and access to specialty care for rural and underserved populations.

This low-cost, high-impact intervention is accomplished by linking expert inter-disciplinary specialist teams with primary care clinicians through teleECHO clinics, in which the experts co-manage patient cases and share their expertise via mentoring, guidance, feedback and didactic education.

This enables primary care clinicians to develop the skills and knowledge to treat patients with common, complex diseases in their own communities which reduces travel costs, wait times, and avoidable complications.

Technology is used to leverage scare healthcare resources, and the specialists at Academic Medical Centers are better able to attend the most complex, high-risk patients. The ECHO model is not “telemedicine” where the specialist assumes the care of the patient, but instead a guided practice model where the primary care clinician retains responsibility for managing the patient, operating with increasing independence as their skills and self-efficacy grow.

Featured Speaker:

Dr. Sanjeev Arora
Director and Founder of Project ECHO

Sanjeev Arora, MD, FACG, MACP is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine with tenure in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.

Over the last 13 years Dr Arora has received more than 65 million dollars of grant support. Dr Arora has been awarded numerous prestigious awards including:

• The Teresa Heinz and the Heinz Family Foundation 19th Heinz Award for Public Policy,

• The Second Rosenthal Award from the Rosenthal Family Foundation,

• The Presidential Award of Distinction from the University of New Mexico and the American College of Physicians and the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) President’s Award.

Dr Arora was also recognized during World Hepatitis Day 2014, at the White House in Washington DC, as a leader in advancing efforts to address viral hepatitis and the goals of the Action Plan for the Prevention, Care, and Treatment of Viral Hepatitis.

About Project ECHO

• The first teleECHO clinic was developed in 2003 to respond to a growing health crisis hepatitis C and has since expanded to cover over 60 disease areas and complex issues at over 100 academic medical centers in 21 countries.

• Adopters of the ECHO Model include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense.

• In 2007, Project ECHO won the Changemakers award, an international competition sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Ashoka Foundation.

• The ECHO Act, was passed unanimously through both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama on December 14, 2016. This legislation mandates and empowers two federal agencies to study the impact of Project ECHO on the U.S. health system, and will serve to lay the pathway for sustainable funding of the model.