2015 London Presentation - Project ECHO: Moving Knowledge Not People - Sanjeev Arora

Speaker: Sanjeev Arora, MD, Founder of Project ECHO, USA

Project ECHO: Moving Knowledge Not People

Project ECHO® 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 teleECHOTM clinics, where experts co-manage patient cases and share their expertise via mentoring, guidance, feedback and didactic education. This enables primary care providers 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. The ECHO modelTM is not “telemedicine” where the specialist assumes the care of the patient, but instead a guided practice model where the primary care provider retains responsibility for managing the patient, operating with increasing independence as their skills and self-efficacy grow. Technology is used to effect force multiplication which is a logarithmic improvement in the capacity to deliver best practice care.