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ProjectECHO--ExpandingtheCapacityofPrimaryCareProviderstoAddressComplexConditions.pdf
CASES IN GLOBAL HEALTH DELIVERY
Amy Madore, Julie Rosenberg, and Rebecca Weintraub prepared this teaching case with assistance from Claire Donovan for the purpose of classroom discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective health care delivery practice.
Cases in Global Health Delivery are produced by the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard. Financial support was provided in part by GE Foundation. © 2017 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. This case is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-‐‑ NonCommercial-‐‑NoDerivs 4.0 International.
We invite you to learn more at www.globalhealthdelivery.org and to join our network at GHDonline.org
GHD-‐‑036 MARCH 2017
Project ECHO: Expanding the Capacity of Primary Care Providers to Address Complex
Conditions
“Medical knowledge is exploding, but it’s often not traveling the last mile to ensure that patients get the right care in the right place at the right time. If we can leverage technology to spread best practices through case-‐‑based learning and
mentoring of providers, we can move knowledge—instead of patients—to get better care to rural and underserved communities across the country.”
—Sanjeev Arora, MD, Project ECHO Founder and ECHO Institute Director
In December 2016, Sanjeev Arora, MD, spoke to a group of primary care and specialist physicians from across the globe interested in joining Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, or Project ECHO®. Arora had developed Project ECHO—a web-‐‑based guided practice model—at the University of New Mexico in 2003 to address the tremendous need for hepatitis C care, particularly in medically underserved areas. At the time, he was one of the only liver specialists in New Mexico, and patients were waiting for months and traveling hundreds of miles to see him. Using videoconferencing, Arora began training primary care providers in remote areas to manage and treat their hepatitis C patients.
Arora and his team worked hard to spread and grow the model, using grants to fund their work. By December 2016, more than 100 institutions in over 20 countries were using the Project ECHO model to train primary care providers to treat more than 55 complex medical conditions. Dozens of peer-‐‑reviewed studies showed Project ECHO was improving provider self-‐‑efficacy and job satisfaction, increasing patient access to specialty care, and, in some cases, saving costs by reducing emergency room and hospital visits.
In December 2016, the United States Congress passed the ECHO Act, mandating that the federal government study the implementation and impact of Project ECHO’s collaborative learning model. Arora and his team had been thinking hard about how to balance fidelity to the model with ensuring local partners could adapt it as needed. He was unsure how the results of the government study might impact his ability to scale Project ECHO to meet the demands of new and current partners.
Distributed by The Case Centre North America Rest of the world www.thecasecentre.org t +1 781 239 5884 t +44 (0)1234 750903 All rights reserved e [email protected] e [email protected] centre
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The United States of America
The United States of America is located in North America, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south (see Exhibit 1 for map). It comprises 50 states and several unincorporated territories. In 2016, it was the world’s third-‐‑largest country in terms of population and land area (9,147,420 km2).
History
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans colonized the eastern territory of North America, displacing indigenous populations (known as “American Indians” or “Native Americans”). After settlers established the United States of America (US; see Appendix for common abbreviations) in the late 18th century, the agricultural industry in the southern part of the country grew rapidly. Americans imported more than 100,000 African slaves to work the land.1 In the 19th century, the federal government forcibly moved Native Americans to “reservations” to make way for expansion. Following a civil war (1861–1865), the US ended slavery and gave Native Americans citizenship; however, these groups continued to be treated as second-‐‑class citizens.2
The US became increasingly powerful and wealthy during the 20th century; however, not all Americans benefitted equally. Discriminatory policies curtailed the rights of Americans of color, particularly black Americans. Organized protests against this treatment, known as the Civil Rights Movement (1954– 1968), culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.3 The Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and nationality.4 Nevertheless, discrimination continued through redlining—the denial of services to certain areas based on their racial or ethnic makeup—in the decades that followed. Inequities persisted between ethnic groups and geographic regions.5
Demographics and Economy
In 2014, most of the US population was white (77.4%); the remainder was black (13.2%), Asian (5.4%), Native American or Alaskan Native (1.2%), or mixed-‐‑race (2.5%). About 17% were of Hispanic or Latino origin.6 Almost one-‐‑fifth of Americans lived in rural areas,7 which tended to be poorer than suburban and urban areas.8
In 2015, 88% of adults had a high school education; less than one-‐‑third held a bachelor’s or higher degree.9 More than 46 million Americans, including 11 million “working poor,”* lived below the US poverty line (USD 11,670 per year for an individual; USD 23,850 per year for a family of four).11,12 Median household income was USD 53,657 in 2015.13 Income inequality was on the rise: In 2014, the average income of the top 10% of households was nearly nine times higher than the bottom 90%.14 White households had 13 times more wealth than the median black household and 10 times more than the median Hispanic household.15 In 2015, unemployment was 5.3%, down from 9.6% in 2010.16,17 The US was the largest national economy in terms of gross domestic product (GDP).18
* The US identified anyone who spent more than half the year working or looking for work and whose income was below the poverty line as “working poor.”10
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Basic Socioeconomic and Demographic Indicators†
INDICATOR YEAR
UN Human Development Index ranking 8 out of 188 2014 Population (thousands) 318,857 2014 Urban population (%) 81 2014
Population using improved drinking water sources (%) 98 2012 Households with children living under
USD 2 per day (millions) 1.65 2011 Gini index 41.1 2013
GDP per capita (current USD) 55,837 2015 Adult literacy (%) 86 2013
New Mexico
In 2015, New Mexico was the 5th largest US state, roughly the size of Vietnam, and the 15th smallest in terms of population (2,085,109).19 One-‐‑third of the population was rural,20 and 18% lived in poverty.21 Most New Mexicans were white (82.8%), 10.4% were Native American or Alaskan Native, and 2.5% were black. Nearly half were Hispanic or Latino.22
Health in the United States
In 2014, the top causes of death were heart disease and cancer, followed by chronic lower respiratory diseases; accidents; stroke; Alzheimer’s disease; diabetes; influenza and pneumonia; kidney disease; and suicide.23 Drug overdose deaths were rising; opioid-‐‑related deaths increased 200% from 2000 to 2015.24
Health System
The US health care system was decentralized, fragmented, and complex. A variety of public and private institutions handled payment, insurance, and delivery functions.
Governance
The Department of Health and Human Services was the federal agency responsible for health promotion and service delivery.25 It oversaw other agencies that addressed public health (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and health care quality and safety (the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), the two main public health insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid), and the needs of indigenous populations (Indian Health Service; IHS).26–28
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) was the largest integrated health system in the country in 2016, with 152 medical centers serving 8.76 million military veterans at 1,700 outpatient clinics annually.29
† Compiled by case writers using data from World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, UNDP, and the US Department of Education.
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States were also responsible for health services, including epidemiological surveillance; public health emergency response; health promotion and disease prevention; environmental health; prison health care; federal program administration; and some lab services.30
Service Delivery
Private providers delivered a majority of health care in the US, even when publicly financed. Americans typically received primary health care from private outpatient clinics or community-‐‑based health centers. Specialist clinics or hospitals provided secondary care and typically required patients to obtain a referral from their primary care provider. Large hospitals delivered tertiary care.
Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), rural health clinics, and other qualifying facilities received federal funding to deliver preventive and primary health care services to underserved populations.31 In 2013, there were more than 1,200 FQHCs serving more than 21 million patients.32 Half of FQHC patients were members of ethnic or minority groups, and 28% had no health insurance.33
In 2016, over 80% of physician offices used electronic health records.34 Clinicians also had access to computerized reminders, clinical guidelines, patient data reports, and diagnostic support.
Financing
In 2014, just over half of US health spending was private; the rest was public.35 Although Americans could purchase private health insurance, most participated in voluntary employer-‐‑sponsored health insurance plans, sharing premium costs with their employers.27 In 2015, over two-‐‑thirds of people under age 65 had private health insurance.36 About 36.5% of the population relied on government-‐‑sponsored health insurance—primarily Medicare and Medicaid.37 People age 65 or older or those with certain disabilities or end-‐‑stage renal disease qualified for Medicare.38
Medicaid, one of the largest payers for health care, provided coverage to qualifying low-‐‑income families, the elderly, people with disabilities, and residents of institutional programs.39 Each state ran its own Medicaid program and determined its payment model. States were moving away from fee-‐‑for-‐‑service models toward private managed care organizations (health management organizations; HMOs) and paying HMOs a capitation rate (per patient, per period of time). HMOs then negotiated compensation plans with providers. Specialist providers often received more than general practitioners. Medicaid payments to providers often were lower than private insurance payments.
Certain Medicaid recipients (e.g., children, the terminally ill) were exempt from out-‐‑of-‐‑pocket costs; the rest paid a small copayment.40 Medicaid “super-‐‑utilizers” (about 5% of enrollees) with complex needs accounted for half of total Medicaid spending in 2011.41
In 2015, the number of uninsured Americans was the lowest it had been in decades (34.5 million, or 10.7% of the population). This was due in part to the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA),42 which increased the income cap for Medicaid eligibility. Between 2013 and 2016, Medicaid enrollment grew by over 15 million (27%). In 2016, more than 72 million Americans were insured through Medicaid.43
Many newly insured Americans suffered from chronic conditions, had had little to no previous contact with health care providers, and lived in underserved rural areas.44 Many private providers did not accept Medicaid. Congress expanded the FQHC system to support the Medicaid-‐‑eligible population.44
In 2014, the US had the highest per capita and total health expenditures globally (USD 9,403 and USD 3 trillion, respectively).45,46 Health spending represented 17.5% of GDP and was climbing,47 but the US had poorer access, equity, and health outcome measures than other high-‐‑income countries.
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Most primary care payment in the US was fee for service, typically ranging from USD 90 to USD 230 per visit at FQHCs, with additional fees for tests.27 FQHCs offered a sliding fee scale to patients.48
Health System and Epidemiologic Indicators‡
Health Workforce
Medical school graduates in the US had to declare their medical focus and complete a 3–4 year residency program in that area before practicing. The median debt for medical graduates was USD 180,000 in 2014; the average annual salary for residents was USD 55,300.49 Residency programs developed clinical knowledge and skills through rounding, the practice of assessing patients and creating treatment plans with other residents and an experienced supervising physician;50 discussion of patient cases (“case-‐‑based learning”); and didactic lectures.51 Federal funding for graduate medical education went primarily to teaching hospitals and exceeded USD 15 billion in 2012. Medicare (USD 9.7 billion) and Medicaid (USD 3.9 billion) were the largest sources. Private support was difficult to measure but thought to be significant.52
National medical boards certified qualified physicians to practice medical specialties (e.g., dermatology, psychiatry) and subspecialties (e.g., pediatric dermatology, addiction psychiatry). The number of specialty and subspecialty boards grew from 18 in 1960 to 158 in 2011.53 In 2013, specialist visits outnumbered primary care visits in the US for the first time.
Family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics residents frequently became primary care physicians (PCPs) and accounted for roughly one-‐‑third of all US doctors in 2014. Medical students who went into primary care often did so out of a desire to develop relationships with patients and help them navigate the health system.54 PCPs were responsible for patients’ comprehensive care and referring them to
‡ Compiled by case writers using data from World Bank, WHO, FAO, and UNAIDS.
INDICATOR YEAR
Average life expectancy at birth (total/female/ male) 79/ 81/77 2015 Maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live births) 14 2015 Under–five mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) 7 2015
Infant mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) 6 2015 Vaccination rates (% of DTP3 coverage) 94 2014
Undernourished (%) <5 2015 Adult (15–49 years) HIV prevalence (per 100,000) 650 2012
HIV antiretroviral therapy coverage (%) 37 2011 Tuberculosis prevalence (per 100,000) 3.8 2014
DOTS coverage (%) 100 2015 Malaria cases (per 1,000) .005 2012
Government expenditure on health as % of total government expenditure 20.7 2013
Government expenditure on health per capita (PPP international dollars, USD) 4,307 2013
Total health expenditure per capita (current USD) 9,146 2013 Physician density (per 10,000) 24.5 2011
Nursing and midwifery density (per 10,000) 98 2010 Number of hospital beds (per 10,000) 29 2011
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specialists as needed. A 2007 study of 776 primary care patients across 30 states found that around 80% of patients referred to a specialist followed through within three months.55
There was no regulation of physicians regarding their scope of practice once trained; however, most PCPs did not treat or diagnose complex conditions. Furthermore, at FQHCs there was no financial incentive to accept more complex patients because Medicaid and Medicare usually reimbursed a fixed amount per patient visit. “A patient who comes to your office for a flu shot and a general checkup,” one physician explained, “earns the clinic USD 150. A patient with heart failure or hepatitis C also earns the clinic USD 150.”§ Some states limited primary care providers’ ability to prescribe certain specialty drugs (e.g., hepatitis C drugs, chemotherapy) due, in part, to medication shortages.
Most PCPs operated in small practices with fewer than five full-‐‑time physicians. However, larger practices were becoming more common because they offered physicians the opportunity to pool risk and expenses.56,57 Nurse practitioners and physician assistants received less education and training than PCPs but could perform many primary care functions. In 2015, PCPs earned an average of USD 195,000 annually; three of the five lowest-‐‑paid physician groups—internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics—were in primary care (see Exhibit 2 for comparison of average salaries).58 Nurse practitioners and physician assistants averaged around USD 98,000.59–61
Community health workers (CHWs) played a growing role in the US health system. Their duties included educating patients and liaising with health and social services. In 2015, CHWs earned an average of USD 40,150 per year.62
Clinical knowledge, treatment protocols, and best practices were continuously evolving. In 2014, scientific and medical journals published more than 2.5 million articles.63 Most states required providers to complete 20 to 150 credit hours of continuing medical education (CME) in clinical, ethical, and management topics every one, two, or three years to maintain their license.64 In 2014, there were over 147,000 accredited CME activities in the US, ranging from free online courses to conferences costing over USD 1,000.65 The CME industry generated USD 2.6 billion in 2015 from various sources, including government grants, private donations, institutional allocations, commercial support, and user registration fees.66 More than one-‐‑quarter of all CME credit earned was internet-‐‑based that year. Interactive CME techniques (e.g., role play, case discussions) increased physician motivation and improved patient outcomes but were used less frequently than didactic presentations and printed materials, which had no or little effect on patient care.67
There was a growing shortage of providers across medical fields.68 In 2016, the US was meeting less than 60% of its need for PCPs (see Exhibit 3 for shortages by state).69 The shortage was most severe in rural areas; in 2013, only 4.8% of medical school graduates chose to practice in rural areas.70
Estimates of the future PCP shortage varied widely, ranging from 20,000 by 2020 to 159,300 by 2025,71 and the specialist gap was expected to reach 46,100 by 2020 (see Exhibit 2 for physician-‐‑to-‐‑population ratios by specialty). Government agencies offered various incentives to raise the number of providers in these areas (see Exhibit 4 for examples)72 and encourage providers to go into primary care.73
Factors contributing to the PCP shortage included pressure on medical students to specialize and the perception that PCPs had more administrative responsibilities than specialists.74 Primary care and emergency physicians faced the highest levels of burnout due to stressful working conditions and demanding schedules with relatively low pay.75
§ These are estimates; reimbursement varied by geographic area. For more on reimbursement at FQHCs and rural health clinics, see https://www.cms.gov/Center/Provider-Type/Federally-Qualified-Health-Centers-FQHC-Center.html.
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Health in New Mexico
In New Mexico, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis prevalence were the highest in the US and twice the national average. The northern part of the state had the highest per capita drug overdose rate in the US.76
The percentage of New Mexicans without health insurance declined from 21.3% in 2002 to 12% in 2014. The state had the second-‐‑highest percentage (28%) of Medicaid recipients in the US.77
New Mexico ranked 46 out of 50 states for unmet primary care needs in 2014.69 “We need providers,” a rural clinic administrator said. “If any of our doctors left, it would be very difficult to replace them. It’s hard to recruit people to the middle of nowhere, and everything has become so specialized that the primary care provider pool is now very small.” A large proportion of specialists worked at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, the one academic medical center serving the entire state.78
Hepatitis C
Discovered in 1989, hepatitis C virus (HCV) spread primarily through infected blood or body fluids and caused a liver infection known as hepatitis C.79 In 2005, standard treatment for HCV was 24–48 weeks of weekly injections combined with twice-‐‑daily oral medication. Dosing and treatment length depended on patient weight and HCV genotype, of which three had been identified.80 Treatment was expensive, had several negative side effects, could produce life-‐‑threatening complications, and had low success rates.81
There was a national shortage of liver specialists. While testing for HCV was simple, generally only specialists, including hepatologists, gastroenterologists, infectious disease physicians, and nurse practitioners specializing in liver disease, treated the condition.82
By 2013, more successful HCV treatments with fewer side effects were available. Prevalence was not well known because most people with acute HCV (a short-‐‑term illness that occurred within the first six months of exposure) were asymptomatic and not tested.83 Of the estimated 3 million people with HCV in the US in 2012, an estimated 38% were linked to care, 11% were being treated, and 6% were cured.84 Indigenous populations had the highest incidence of acute HCV, and injection drug use was the most common mode of transmission in the US.85 Around 80% of people with HIV who injected drugs had HCV.86
In 2010, nearly 25,000 adults in New Mexico had HCV.87 Average annual health care spending for Medicaid recipients with HCV was USD 26,832, compared with USD 6,521 for other patients.88 Prevalence was high in prisons, and the state-‐‑run prison health system could not afford to provide treatment.89
In 2003, access to specialists trained in HCV management was extremely limited for rural New Mexicans.78 Patients waited months and drove for hours to see the state’s top liver specialist, Sanjeev Arora, MD, at the UNM Health Science Center HCV clinic, one of only a few in the state.90
Teaching Primary Care Providers to Treat HCV
Arora grew up and studied in India before moving to the US for residency and fellowship training in gastroenterology and hepatology. In 1993, he left a prestigious teaching position and clinical practice in Boston to run UNM Hospital’s section of gastroenterology and HCV clinic, on the condition that UNM expand the endoscopy** suite’s daily capacity from 10–15 cases to 50 cases.91
** A nonsurgical procedure used to examine a patient’s digestive tract.
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The volume of patients presenting with severe HCV deeply concerned Arora. Patients typically had to wait eight months to get an appointment once referred by their primary care provider, by which time many had developed liver cancer or failure. “The problem was that knowledge was trapped in the heads of ‘super experts’ at academic medical centers like UNM, creating a monopoly,” he said. “Patients needed options close to home, from doctors who could monitor their health during the rigorous HCV treatment regimen.”
In late 2003, Arora had an idea: What if he could train primary care providers to treat and manage HCV?91 He had worked with many primary care providers who had referred patients to him and believed that, with the right knowledge, training, and mentorship, they could provide safe, effective HCV care. Helping primary care providers treat their patients would reduce his patient load and the wait for appointments, and Arora would be there to help with the most complicated cases.
Arora was unsure how primary care providers would respond: “I knew it could work in theory, but I didn’t know if it would work in practice.” He wondered, Would they have the desire and time to learn new skills? Would they do it without being paid? Arora also would need specialists who were willing to participate without compensation. He imagined using videoconferencing to conduct weekly “rounds” that combined case-‐‑based learning with input from the HCV clinic team.
In 2004, Arora began visiting FQHCs, IHS and other primary care clinics, and prisons around the state to present his idea to providers and clinic administrators, many of whom he already knew through his clinical work. He presented on HCV epidemiology, treatment, and access to care and his plan to train primary care providers. Arora then signed up primary care providers who wanted to become HCV experts: “I told them my hope was that their patients could get treatment in their local communities right away.”
Not everyone was interested in participating, but Arora was hopeful. “If there were 20 clinicians in an FQHC, all I needed was one to become my mentee,” he said. “If one decides to do it, it changes the game for everyone because now that provider can accept HCV referrals from their colleagues.”
Interested providers had to get permission from their clinic directors to dedicate clinic time to participating in the videoconference sessions. “This was usually providers’ primary concern,” Arora explained. “Some FQHC directors worried that increasing the complexity of patients in the clinic would hurt productivity because reimbursement rates for office visits were pretty standard.” Arora did not have funding support for his new project, so he used personal time to recruit participants, develop a curriculum, and train providers.
While providers initially traveled to UNM for a few days to receive informal and ad hoc HCV training, Arora soon offered a more organized two-‐‑day training on the HCV treatment protocol, videoconferencing technology, and case presentation format. The multidisciplinary UNM HCV clinic team facilitated the weekly two-‐‑hour “knowledge network” sessions. Before each session, providers completed a case presentation template—excluding identifying patient information in accordance with US health information protection laws—and then uploaded and shared it via a web-‐‑based UNM database. Arora dedicated the first 90 minutes of each session to patient case discussions. Primary care providers took turns presenting their cases and asking each other and the specialist team for input on treatment initiation and dosing, side effects, and psychiatric conditions and substance abuse. Arora facilitated the discussion and then did a 30-‐‑ minute didactic presentation on an aspect of HCV management.
Arora used UNM’s Polycom® communications system to host the videoconference calls. He preferred video to build trust and encourage providers to become more comfortable presenting cases and sharing questions and ideas. Some participating clinics already had Polycom systems; others had to purchase hardware, software, and/or additional internet bandwidth. Participants could call in by phone if needed.
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Approximately 20 providers, including nurse practitioners, PCPs, and physician assistants regularly participated in the initial sessions. Arora’s team entered patient data into a central database to monitor patient progress and outcomes. It often took providers several sessions to become comfortable presenting cases, asking questions, and sharing their opinion. “I was anxious when I first started participating,” a family physician recounted. “The specialists don’t try to put us on the spot, though. They suggest things we might do differently next time, but then they remind you that they didn’t expect you to have done all these things before presenting your case. It’s all part of the learning process.” Providers billed insurance for HCV treatment at their usual patient visit rate, not at the rate specialists treating HCV billed. The primary care providers remained liable for patient care.
Providers typically started treating HCV within a few weeks of joining the weekly “knowledge network” sessions. They periodically shared case updates, and the specialist team recommended midcourse corrections as needed. After five or six months of weekly sessions, most providers were, according to Arora, “very knowledgeable” and felt confident initiating treatment on their own. At that point, they usually reduced their “knowledge network” participation to every two or three weeks. Arora gave his phone number to participants in case they needed to reach him directly.
A year after starting the HCV sessions, Arora and his team named their initiative the Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, or Project ECHO®. They were inspired by the “cooperative extension” programs that state universities had developed in the 19th century to transmit agricultural best practices to rural farmers by sending an “extension agent” to different farms to provide customized recommendations based on the local challenges.
Project ECHO
When Arora told people about Project ECHO, he emphasized that it was not telemedicine or a webinar. Instead, it was “a guided practice model” that allowed primary care providers to continue managing their patients, operating with increasing independence as their skills and confidence grew. He explained, “It’s one specialist to many primary care clinicians instead of one specialist to one patient.” While the volume of patients in Arora’s clinic remained the same, those cases were often more complex. Over an 18-‐‑month period, the average wait time to initiate treatment with Arora fell from eight months to two weeks.
The HCV team worked with UNM’s undergraduate medical education evaluators to create an evaluation plan that could demonstrate Project ECHO’s impact. The plan included observation of ECHO clinics, monitoring a database of provider participation and case presentations (including patient outcomes data), and routine surveys—initially paper-‐‑based—about providers’ knowledge, self-‐‑efficacy, experience with ECHO clinic facilitators, and barriers to using ECHO.92 Ideas from social cognitive theory, situated learning theory, and communities of practice also supported what Arora began calling “the ECHO model.”
Arora and his HCV team began referring to weekly sessions as “teleECHO clinics” (see Glossary for Project ECHO terminology) and awarded CME credit for participation through UNM’s Office of Continuing Medical Education.
Arora began looking for funding to support the HCV team’s time and offset some of the clinics’ start-‐‑ up costs. In 2004, he received a three-‐‑year USD 1.45 million grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that helped clinics pay for software, hardware, internet bandwidth, and a CHW to assist with data entry for case presentations. More than 20 health centers and clinics across New Mexico were participating in the HCV TeleECHO Clinic. Arora’s team surveyed participants to solicit feedback on session content and structure and incorporated feedback into the model; for example, primary care providers noted that patients were reluctant to answer questions on UNM’s HCV screening tool about
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sexual and illegal drug activity because everyone in their community knew each other. One of the rural clinics suggested offering a list of common HCV risk factors that patients could read, followed by the question, “Based on these factors, would you like to have an HCV test?” Arora’s team adopted the change.
Arora hired infectious disease specialist Karla Thornton to consult on patients who were co-‐‑infected with HCV and HIV in the HCV TeleECHO Clinic.
Beyond HCV and New Mexico
While leading the HCV TeleECHO Clinic at UNM, Arora continued to recruit new primary care providers across the state. At one FQHC, family medicine physician and addiction specialist Miriam Komaromy was interested in Project ECHO for substance abuse. “There was nothing specific to HCV about the model; it was just the first condition they used it for,” Komaromy said. “Using the model for addiction seemed like a natural next step because injection drug use is behind so many cases of HCV infection.”
Arora invited Komaromy to observe the HCV program and develop an ECHO for substance use and behavioral health disorders. Komaromy recalled, “A big part of starting the new ECHO was driving around this large rural state to give lunchtime talks and grand rounds, and staying afterwards to talk to people who wanted to get involved.” One primary care provider was immediately interested in joining, noting, “Doctors tend to be people who like to learn. You spend all this time learning in medical school, and then you graduate and that’s it. You do CMEs each year, but they don’t usually teach new skills. Project ECHO was a chance to learn something new while addressing a critical problem in my community.”
In 2005, Arora and Komaromy launched the Integrated Addiction and Psychiatry (IAP) TeleECHO Clinic at UNM. The IAP specialist team included Komaromy, a psychiatrist, a clinical social worker with addiction expertise, a psychiatric nurse, and a CHW.
From June 2003 through 2005, the HCV teleECHO clinic presented hundreds of patient cases, giving participants hundreds of training hours and no-‐‑fee CME credits. Resources for Arora, his team of 4–6 paid staff and 2–3 volunteers, and participating clinics became stretched. Arora approached the New Mexico State Legislature to solicit funding for his “low-‐‑cost, high-‐‑impact” approach to improving health care access. “He was a relentless salesman,” one state senator recalled.
In 2006, the legislature approved USD 1.5 million in annual funding to expand Project ECHO’s HCV work in New Mexico, and then to tackle other diseases affecting New Mexicans (e.g., diabetes) and to develop CHW programs to support those efforts.
The following year, Arora and his team won a USD 1.5 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to support pilot research for four additional health conditions. They published their first peer-‐‑reviewed journal article in Academic Medicine, identifying their criteria for disease selection: (1) high prevalence; (2) complex management; (3) evolving treatment; (4) high societal (health and economic) impact; (5) serious consequences when untreated; and (6) significantly improved outcomes from treatment.78
On the HCV TeleECHO Clinic’s annual survey, providers reported greater confidence and competence in their ability to diagnose, treat, and monitor HCV-‐‑infected patients whom they previously would have referred to a specialist. Most providers also said Project ECHO diminished their professional isolation and increased their job satisfaction (see Exhibit 5 for survey results). Clinics wanting to grow saw Project ECHO as an opportunity to attract new patients and retain patients they otherwise would have referred to a specialist. Komaromy explained, “A lot of people who decide to work in community health centers and FQHCs do so because they really care about the health of the population they’re serving, so many of them are enthusiastic about ECHO even though they’re not being reimbursed directly for providers’
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participation.” The biggest challenge participants faced was allocating two hours each week—usually their lunch hour and an hour they would have used to see patients—to participate. This applied especially to clinics at or over capacity, which found it more difficult to justify spending time on teleECHO clinics.
Philanthropic Support
In 2007, Arora applied to a global competition called Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care, hosted jointly by the US-‐‑based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Ashoka, an organization that promoted social entrepreneurship. A RWJF senior adviser, Nancy Barrand, and the other competition judges were excited by “the idea that Arora was moving knowledge down the clinical chain of command,” Barrand said. ECHO was one of three winners from more than 300 entries from 27 countries.
When RWJF invited the winners to submit in-‐‑depth proposals for up to USD 1.5 million, Arora submitted a “conventional proposal,” Barrand said. But she believed there was more there. She convinced a fellow reviewer to fly with her to Albuquerque to observe an HCV TeleECHO Clinic. Barrand recalled:
We were blown away as we watched a PCP from the IHS in Montana discuss his patient’s case via videoconference with a PCP and a nurse practitioner from two different parts of New Mexico and the specialist team at UNM. We were watching the learning as it happened, and you could start to imagine it— how the world of medical practice might change if there were teleECHO clinics across the world discussing best practices for different diseases and networking providers for the purpose of learning.
RWJF asked Arora to submit a new proposal that “gave us his vision rather than what he thought we wanted,” Barrand said. In 2008, RWJF awarded Project ECHO a three-‐‑year USD 5 million grant to expand in New Mexico and to test its potential to replicate elsewhere, starting with the University of Washington (UW), which had approached Arora about starting its own project.
Arora’s team further developed the IAP program—including the addition of buprenorphine waiver training for providers who wanted to be certified in prescribing the opioid addiction medication. Using their disease selection criteria and available epidemiological data, they launched new Project ECHOs in asthma, diabetes, rheumatology, chronic pain, and high-‐‑risk pregnancy. They trained UW to set up and run teleECHO clinics. A Project ECHO staff member noted, “The learning process at that time was very ad hoc. People came to observe some of our teleECHO clinics, and Dr. Arora told them how he ran them.”
UW adapted Project ECHO to meet its needs, capturing teleECHO clinics on video and creating an archive of didactic and case presentations participants could search. Arora asked UW to share how they did it so that UNM could develop its own searchable archive.
Arora promoted Karla Thornton to associate director to manage HCV teleECHO clinics and create a peer health education ECHO for state prisoners. Arora also approached UNM autism experts about starting a Project ECHO to support teachers, therapists, and other providers at three schools in India specializing in developmental disabilities. The University of Chicago became the first Project ECHO site focused on urban areas, helping FQHCs treat hypertension in black males.
As news of Project ECHO spread, more organizations contacted Arora for advice on how to start their own programs with local primary care clinics. He began calling Project ECHO a “hub and spoke” model; the facilitating organization was the hub, and its teleECHO clinic sites, the spokes.
Some ECHO staff suggested creating legal documents to formalize partnerships between UNM and hubs and to build a consistent brand. Arora was reluctant: “I didn’t want to create any barriers to replication.”
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Communications
In 2009, Arora hired an assistant to help him prepare publications and comply with UNM marketing and communications guidelines, and RWJF hired Washington, DC–based Burness Communications to support Project ECHO communications, policy, and strategy. With expansion on his mind, Arora wanted to approach large federal health agencies such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Ben Milder, Burness’s public policy team director for Project ECHO, was well connected and generated meetings between Arora and health agency leaders. Milder helped draft the strategy and agenda for these meetings, explaining, “An important part of our work was knocking on doors and building relationships for ECHO.”
In early 2010, after several meetings, Arora and the VHA agreed to pilot Project ECHO at select VHA sites. Arora also wanted to see if the New Mexico Medicaid program might reimburse providers when they presented Medicaid patients in teleECHO clinics. Arora believed Project ECHO could lower Medicaid costs by enabling primary care providers to treat patients in their communities, reducing the need for higher-‐‑cost specialty care and hospitalization. RWJF and Burness introduced Arora to leadership at the Center for Health Care Strategies, a nonprofit health policy organization that connected him to state and federal leaders. When the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the time, Don Berwick, met Arora, he said, “I was swept away,” and joked, “I became the president of the Sanjeev Arora fan club.”93 Berwick believed Project ECHO could help US health care achieve the “Triple Aim.”††94
Research
Providers told Arora that participating in Project ECHO motivated them to expand their clinical skills and made them feel less isolated professionally by connecting them with like-‐‑minded practitioners. A family physician noted, “Oftentimes, the patients we’re discussing through Project ECHO—those with HCV, chronic pain, or addictions—are patients nobody wants to care for. Other providers are surprised to hear that I’m spending time on these patients, so it’s nice to connect with people in the state who realize how important it is to care for them.”
Between the positive feedback he was hearing from primary care providers and his own observations, Arora was confident about the impact of Project ECHO, but he needed better proof. He wanted to show funders that patients in the care of Project ECHO-‐‑trained primary care providers were doing as well those under specialists’ care.
With USD 3 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, RWJF, and the New Mexico State Legislature, Arora worked with UNM researchers and Project ECHO program directors to design a prospective cohort study of the HCV program. “One of the benefits of hepatitis C treatment protocols was that we had patient lab values over time in the database,” the Project ECHO research director explained. “It would have been more difficult to do this kind of study for chronic pain or IAP because they do not have similarly standardized, biological treatment measures.”
Looking at 407 patients with chronic HCV infection without previous treatment (controlling for patient characteristics), the study found that 57.5% of patients treated at the UNM HCV clinic and 58.2% of patients treated at one of 21 ECHO sites had no detectable HCV viral load for at least 24 weeks following treatment. Serious adverse events occurred more in UNM patients (13.7%) than in ECHO site patients (6.9%). Other studies showed that providers trained through Project ECHO to treat HCV outperformed both VHA providers and community-‐‑based hepatologists. In June 2011, Arora and his coauthors published their †† The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim framework for optimizing health system (Health Affairs, 2008) suggests that health systems should simultaneously pursue three dimensions: improving the patient experience of care (quality and satisfaction), improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of health care.
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findings in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).95 Burness promoted the article and introduced Arora to the editor of another peer-‐‑reviewed health policy journal, Health Affairs. Soon thereafter, the journal published the first national health policy piece about Project ECHO, which Burness helped compose.44
Building a Reputation
In addition to publishing in journals, Arora and other Project ECHO program directors presented at conferences and meetings. Inquiries from academic medical centers and other organizations increased dramatically. “Communicating about Project ECHO became more and more work,” an ECHO team member said, “and we realized someone needed to review everything to ensure our messaging was consistent.” Arora made his assistant the new communications coordinator.
By the fall of 2010, Project ECHO hubs were using the model for 13 diseases: asthma and pulmonary disease; child, adolescent, and family psychiatry; chronic pain and headache; diabetes/cardiovascular risk reduction; HCV; high-‐‑risk pregnancy; HIV/AIDS; IAP; medical ethics; occupational medicine; pediatric obesity; psychotherapy; and rheumatology. Roughly 25 full-‐‑time Project ECHO employees at UNM provided logistical support to hubs and spokes and helped with curriculum development, research, communications, and fundraising.
As RWJF started to think toward the end of its funding for Project ECHO, which would come after its second and final grant, it suggested Arora charge a fee for the initial training he provided partners. Arora refused: How could I advocate that others give away their knowledge for free, he thought, and then turn around and charge for mine? Barrand worked with Arora to identify other possible funding sources.
New Funding
In 2011, a managed care organization (MCO) in New Mexico began reimbursing clinics USD 50 each time a provider presented a Medicaid patient insured through the MCO in a teleECHO clinic to offset a portion of the revenue clinics lost when providers were in teleECHO sessions. When the MCO noticed that few providers were billing for their presentations, it increased the reimbursement to USD 150; however, providers continued to bill infrequently. Many clinics applied for grants to cover the costs of providers’ participation in Project ECHO.
GE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of US-‐‑based multinational corporation General Electric (GE), was looking for opportunities to increase access to behavioral health services following a school shooting near GE’s headquarters in Connecticut. Foundation leaders met with Arora and visited several Project ECHO sites. The prospect of new funding inspired Arora to ask Erika Harding, who had been developing the diabetes teleECHO clinic and its CHW training curricula, to direct replication efforts. At the time, there were approximately 10 replication partners.
Arora, Harding, and others began writing the second RWJF grant for USD 5 million over three years. One of their goals was to make Project ECHO at UNM more autonomous. RWJF encouraged Arora to consider whether UNM was the right place to continue growing Project ECHO. It took several months to hire new staff, and Arora had to comply with UNM salary caps. They decided the faculty opportunities for Project ECHO program directors and specialists at UNM outweighed the drawbacks of bureaucratic delays.
Other objectives of the RWJF proposal included replicating in two new states, creating a “MetaECHO Conference” that would convene partners and other stakeholders once every 18 months, and developing a software program for tracking Project ECHO programs and partners. “We didn’t have a good internal
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tracking tool,” Harding said, “so it was hard to know who was doing what where. Basically, it was all in Dr. Arora’s head.” At Harding’s suggestion, they included the creation of a legal structure for replication.
GE Foundation and RWJF worked with Burness to announce their respective grants at a joint press briefing in June 2013. Part of GE Foundation’s three-‐‑year USD 5 million grant would fund the development of a new Project ECHO program, ECHO Access, to recruit and train CHWs to support the patients the IAP program discussed. Arora advocated that they pilot it in New Mexico first. “I wanted to make sure it worked well before taking it to other settings,” he said. A program participant noted, “ECHO has created the opportunity to learn from people who are like walking, talking psychiatric and behavioral health encyclopedias or textbooks.”
Project ECHO on the Ground: The IAP TeleECHO Clinic
When primary care providers first began treating patients with substance use and behavioral health disorders, they typically needed a lot of support from the IAP specialist team. Common questions included how to diagnose, initiate treatment, and address treatment resistance or comorbidities. The specialist team facilitated role-‐‑play to help providers practice talking to patients about sensitive issues. Providers’ questions and participation often changed over time; they might attend the clinic less frequently, and when they did call in, they presented patients with atypical or otherwise more complex presentations of disease. An average of 147 providers participated in IAP annually, and those who attended more than one session averaged 12–13 sessions over a period of 16–17 months.96 A nurse practitioner explained, “After participating in IAP for about two years, I would say I have the equivalent of a two-‐‑year fellowship in behavioral health and psychiatry … The CME hours have been helpful as well.”
Komaromy noted:
Evidence-‐‑based guidelines are incredibly important, but there’s often not evidence. The ability to rely on guidelines or information you could look up online breaks down with more complicated patients. For example, there’s not usually guidance on how to treat someone who is homeless and has low health literacy. That’s where the collective wisdom of a group of people all putting their heads together and sharing ideas and suggestions to help guide a clinical approach is so powerful.
Primary care providers referred complex or very ill patients to psychiatrists or other specialists. “We don’t claim that every patient with a behavioral health disorder or a substance use disorder can be treated in primary care,” Komaromy said. “Our goal is to help primary care providers identify those patients who really do need specialty or emergency care right now and to help them get that care.”
The ECHO Institute
GE Foundation and RWJF grant funding supported a new ECHO Institute at UNM dedicated to replicating the ECHO model globally. Building on early replication support efforts, the ECHO team developed a replication process. The Institute led trainings and offered technical assistance to partners. Interested sites were encouraged to join a monthly Project ECHO overview Arora led via videoconference.
Arora and his technology team switched from Polycom to a cloud-‐‑based platform called Zoom, which users could download from the internet and did not require specific hardware. It also adapted to low-‐‑ bandwidth settings, which reduced the likelihood of dropped calls.
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Project ECHO Hubs
Most organizations interested in Project ECHO were academic medical centers or large nonprofit organizations. Arora and Harding rigorously vetted other potential partners to ensure they were in good legal standing and their intentions aligned with the Project ECHO mission. They rarely turned anyone down, and when they did, it was because their organization’s mission was not aligned with ECHO’s.
The ECHO Institute formalized an ECHO Model™ and identified four core components the hubs were expected to incorporate: (1) use technology to leverage scarce resources and lower the transaction costs of collaboration; (2) share best practices to reduce disparities; (3) employ case-‐‑based learning to master complexity; and (4) monitor outcomes to ensure value. All sites wanting to become Project ECHO hubs had to sign an intellectual property terms of use agreement and a statement of collaboration to show their commitment. Harding said:
One of our goals was to identify the ECHO Model as intellectual property and protect it from being stolen and commercialized. But it was even more about creating a communication mechanism with our partners and about the relationship between us. Mutual sharing is so fundamental to what we do, but until we developed partnership agreements, we didn’t have a way to talk about and enforce it. So it was about creating the expectation that you’re going to share, and then ensuring the legal right for partners to use what we shared, and vice versa.
Some existing replication partners were reluctant to sign the documents. “At that point, there wasn’t much value to offer them beyond the ECHO model, which we’d already given to them,” Harding said.
Specialists and administrators from committed partners attended a one-‐‑day orientation held monthly in Albuquerque that offered a basic overview of the model and implementation, followed by a two-‐‑day immersion training with more in-‐‑depth instruction on how to start and sustain a Project ECHO program. Attendees observed live teleECHO clinics, discussed the recommended “anatomy” of a teleECHO clinic (see Exhibit 6 for suggested clinic format), and participated in a “Mock ECHO” where they practiced the roles of clinic director, clinic coordinator, specialist, and spoke participant. Institute team members provided feedback on the role-‐‑play and how to engage primary care providers. The importance of case-‐‑based learning was emphasized throughout. One team member explained, “Without that, what you have is a weekly webinar or lecture—it’s not the same thing. We don’t want people to confuse ECHO with Zoom. Technology helps expand reach and access and is part of the model, but it’s not the core.”
Arora aimed to keep his schedule as clear as possible during “training week” and to meet with every person or group who attended. “He feels a personal connection to them,” a replication team member explained. “Participants see his presence as something really valuable.” In addition to the hub organizers, the Institute urged people to bring a leader from their university or organization, their funding institution, and any other collaborating partners (e.g., external evaluators) to the orientation and immersion events to secure their support.
Arora and Harding encouraged partners to recruit site teleECHO clinic directors who were passionate about Project ECHO. “It’s always champion-‐‑driven,” Harding said. The directors also needed to have strong facilitation and interpersonal skills. One noted, “You need someone who’s a recognized expert but also a good listener who really enjoys teaching. There are some people who are really smart and talented clinicians who aren’t good teachers.” Hubs also needed someone to provide technical support to participants and ensure the videoconference sessions ran smoothly.
In 2014, Arora hired internist Bruce Struminger—who had participated in the HCV TeleECHO Clinic as a physician with the IHS in Arizona—as a third associate director to manage partnerships with the IHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the Institute’s global HIV and TB programs and
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several of its New Mexico programs. Miriam Komaromy, an associate director as of 2012, oversaw the IAP program, Complex Care program, and CHW programs (see Exhibit 7 for an Institute organizational chart).
The number of Project ECHO hubs outside the US began to grow, including programs in Canada, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Northern Ireland, and there were plans to launch an HIV hub in Namibia with the Namibian Ministry of Health.
Transitions
As the Institute got off the ground, RWJF helped Arora arrange a meeting with a trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust, who invited Arora to collaborate to develop an Endocrinology TeleECHO Clinic (Endo ECHO) to address its interest in diabetes. They launched Endo ECHO in May 2014. The hub team— an adult endocrinologist, a pediatric endocrinologist, a diabetes educator, a CHW, a social worker, a nurse manager, a kidney specialist, and a psychiatrist—worked toward “patient-‐‑centered” care. The nurse manager explained, “Beyond clinical care, we talk about things that impact everyday life, whether you have diabetes or not, because those types of things—losing your job, not having health insurance, getting a divorce—affect the way we feel about ourselves, and that affects the way we manage our health.”97
The Helmsley Charitable Trust made it a grant requirement for the ECHO Institute to hire a chief operating officer (COO) and to make a plan for promoting fidelity to the ECHO model. “They were really pushing us to standardize our business processes and to do a lot more work with our hub-‐‑and-‐‑spoke model,” an Institute staff member said. “I think we would have gotten there eventually, but having a funder say, ‘You need to do this,’ was a big driver.”
Arora was hesitant at first to create the COO role and pass day-‐‑to-‐‑day operations on to someone else. Ultimately, he hired a successful business strategist, Charrissa Lin, who had spent years working for private corporations and consulting companies and was looking for a higher calling. “My role was becoming more and more externally facing,” Arora said. “I spent a lot of time traveling and talking to potential partners and payers, so I needed a more internally focused person who could keep the machine running.”
GE Foundation and the Helmsley Charitable Trust continued to fund Burness’s work covering their respective grant activities. “I think they saw value in the connections we were helping ECHO build and in making sure that communications and policy were an important part of ECHO’s continuing expansion,” Milder said. “We had helped the Institute tell its story in ways that reflected the priorities of different funders.” A June 2014 New York Times piece98 on Project ECHO created another surge of interest.
“Building a Movement”
Arora and his leadership team contemplated ways to expand Project ECHO further. They looked at what other organizations had done. Arora summarized their thinking:
We ruled out the for-‐‑profit model because it wasn’t conducive to reaching the poorest of the poor. We looked at the world’s leading health care nonprofit organizations, including academic medical centers, and saw that they have two goals: one is to help the world, and the second is to help their own organization. They’re reluctant to share their best practices. We knew that this model wouldn’t work either, so we asked, ‘What model would?’ We decided: a movement.
A management consultant suggested the Institute set an “audacious” goal to help communicate its vision. In 2014, Arora announced ECHO’s goal to “touch 1 billion lives by 2025.” That fall, the Institute organized and hosted its first MetaECHO Conference in Albuquerque. Burness helped design the program and prepared Institute staff and partners to deliver brief TED Talk–style “ECHO Talks” to inspire people
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before Arora introduced the concept of “the ECHO movement.” “You are part of it,” he told attendees. As he later explained, “We often describe ECHO as a coalition of the willing—of specialists who want to extend their knowledge and expertise for the social good and of primary care providers who want to do more for patients who would otherwise have great difficulty getting the care they need.”99
The Institute developed an online, cloud-‐‑based software program called iECHO to help teleECHO clinic program coordinators manage logistics and data. They also started using an online file-‐‑sharing service, Box, to share resources with hubs, including Project ECHO talking points and promotional materials, notes from monthly MetaECHO calls, sample case presentation forms and didactic presentations by disease, evaluation tools, curriculum development tools, job descriptions, budgeting, and fundraising tools. The Institute asked hubs to include a technical assistance line item in grant proposals that, if funded, would go to the Institute for training and support costs (see Exhibit 8 for a sample teleECHO clinic startup budget). Partners could upload resources they developed as well; they did so rarely, despite reminders to share.
In the summer of 2015, GE Foundation awarded the Institute a new grant of USD 14 million to bring the Project ECHO model to 1,000 FQHCs and to pilot a teleECHO clinic on quality improvement in FQHCs. GE Foundation’s goal was “to transform primary care,” with FQHCs as the strategic focus. Emergency physician David Barash had become chief medical officer and executive director of the global health portfolio. He was excited about Project ECHO’s potential:
This is a platform where you can transfer knowledge about any subject matter. It’s like the Apple operating system—I believe that ECHO could become a new operating system for workforce development. At the Foundation, we think strategically about how to invest our philanthropic dollars, using the same principles any investor would use when choosing where to deploy their resources. We look for impact and return on investment. Project ECHO’s model exemplifies how adults learn new skills and can change forever how we transfer our expertise to others.
The grant funded 8 new replication staff for a total of 11 members. At the end of the year, Arora hired a chief technology officer to improve and expand iECHO based on user feedback to better support the administration and evaluation of teleECHO clinics.
Funders and other advisers continued to encourage Arora to charge a fee for technical assistance or turn ECHO into a franchise model that could be sold to hubs (see Exhibit 9 for Project ECHO funding over time). However, Arora remained opposed. “Charging people, even a small amount of money, would slow down the movement because a lot of the people we want to reach don’t have that money,” he explained. Instead, as Lin put it, “We need to get embedded in the ongoing payment streams of health care. It could be that, or health education. How do we get state departments of health or Medicaid to pay?”
According to Arora, “One choice we’ve made is to say that it’s okay if we don’t sustain ourselves as an organization. If the Institute goes away in a few years, so what? The movement will have been built and will continue.” While this attitude was motivating to some, it led some junior staff to feel undervalued. Most staff across the Institute worked there because they believed in the mission, and many had taken significant pay cuts to do so. “Every day, it seems like there’s a new hub or a new country or a new disease state, which keeps it exciting but can also be a little overwhelming at times,” one employee noted.
Superhubs
With the hub-‐‑and-‐‑spoke onboarding model defined, leadership started to wonder about the potential to speed expansion by replicating more of the Institute’s work. They mentioned the idea to a few hubs, and there was interest. These new “superhubs” would be responsible for raising awareness about ECHO, training and supporting new hubs, maintaining fidelity across hubs, collaborating and sharing updates with the Institute, and developing a strategy for sustaining themselves.
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By mid-‐‑2016, there were seven superhubs: Northern Ireland Hospice, Universidad de la República in Uruguay, the ECHO India Trust, and, in the US, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the University of Wyoming, the University of Chicago, and the Missouri Telehealth Network. The American Academy of Pediatrics trained a pediatric sickle cell anemia care provider in Cincinnati, Ohio, to be a Project ECHO hub—the first not trained by the ECHO Institute. The Institute sent the hub a letter welcoming it to the MetaECHO Community and explaining the Institute’s role. Superhubs created their own partnership documents, subject to the ECHO Institute’s approval.
Outlook
The second MetaECHO Conference, funded by GE Foundation, took place in April 2016 and drew more than 400 attendees from 15 countries (see Exhibit 10 for a list of Project ECHO partners). “We need around 1,000 hubs across the globe to touch 1 billion lives by 2025,” Arora told to attendees. The leadership team had started to talk about what it meant to touch lives at a primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary level—from doctors trained and patients discussed in clinics, to the other patients benefiting from better-‐‑trained physicians, physicians trained by ECHO participants, and the friends and family of beneficiaries. The numbers added up quickly.
The Institute and a few partners were using the ECHO model for nonmedical issues as well, such as assistive technologies for students with disabilities and crisis intervention for law enforcement (see Exhibit 11 for program overviews). “So many people are presenting about ECHO, and many hubs are publishing now,” Harding said. “ECHO seeds are being planted all the time” (see Exhibit 12 for a selection of Project ECHO publications). Most peer-‐‑reviewed publications described Project ECHO’s impact in terms of provider participation, satisfaction, and/or knowledge and clinical competence. Studies suggested Project ECHO changed provider behavior (one study) and patient outcomes (six studies) and could generate savings for the health system (two studies).100 In June 2016, the US Surgeon General visited the ECHO Institute to learn more about its potential to curb the US’ opioid epidemic. The Department of Health and Human Services was requiring grantees to use Project ECHO in a new program aimed at improving opioid addiction treatment in primary care practices.
By December 2016, the ECHO Institute—with over 100 faculty and staff—was supporting 100 Project ECHO hubs in more than 30 US states and 21 countries to address more than 55 conditions, and more than 200 new ECHO projects were in development. And, as of that date, there had been no medical malpractice cases associated with Project ECHO.
As 2016 came to a close, US senators Orrin Hatch (R-‐‑Utah) and Brian Schatz (D-‐‑Hawaii) introduced a bill, the Expanding Capacity for Health Outcomes (ECHO) Act, to Congress to better integrate Project ECHO’s “technology-‐‑enabled collaborative learning and capacity-‐‑building model” into health systems nationwide. The bill emerged from a conversation between a Hatch staffer who had attended a Burness briefing on GE Foundation’s support of ECHO and a Schatz staffer familiar with the Hawaii ECHO hub.
The bill would require the Department of Health and Human Services to study how Project ECHO and similar models could create cost savings and improve health care, and how to advance the use of such models and integrate them into current funding streams and innovative grant proposals. It did not include any financial appropriations.
The ECHO Act passed in both the House and the Senate, and the president signed it into law in December 2016. Arora considered whether this political attention and the new research it would inspire were what he needed to expand the ECHO model. What else would he need to create the “coalition of the willing” that would be crucial to reaching 1 billion lives?
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Appendix Common Acronyms and Abbreviations
ACA Affordable Care Act ACO Accountable care organization CHCS Center for Health Care Strategies CHW Community health worker CME Continuing medical education CMS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services COO Chief operating officer ECHO Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes FQHC Federally qualified health center GE General Electric HCV Hepatitis C virus HIV Human immunodeficiency virus IAP Integrated Addiction and Psychiatry IHS Indian Health Service MCO Managed care organization PCP Primary care physician RWJF Robert Wood Johnson Foundation UNM University of New Mexico US United States USD United States Dollars VHA Veterans Health Administration
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Glossary of Project ECHO Terms
Term National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Offers both scholarship and loan-‐‑repayment programs for physicians
Definition Demonopolize Share freely with others particularly in the case of knowledge to enable others to
become equally expert.
Dry Run A rehearsal that is scheduled prior to the teleECHO clinic launch where hub sites
check VTC capability of the hub and spoke sites and to provide housekeeping information.
ECHO® Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes
ECHO Access A program aimed at expanding access to treatment for Mental Health Disorders (MHDs) and Substance Abuse Disorders (SUDs), supported by the Integrated Addictions and Psychiatry (IAP) teleECHO program.
ECHO Care™ An innovative program supported by the Complex Care TeleECHO Clinic, designed to improve access to primary and specialty care for patients with complex needs while also reducing the cost of care and improving the quality of care by utilizing a multidisciplinary team-‐‑based approach.
ECHO Health® Project ECHO’s coordination application used primarily as a patient and care team management application.
ECHO Institute™ Refers to Project ECHO’s legal entity, faculty and staff as well as headquarters and
physical location at UNMHSC in Albuquerque, NM.
ECHO Model™ Developed as a platform for both healthcare service delivery and research in 2003.
The ECHO model is based on four core pillars: 1. use technology to leverage scarce resources, 2. sharing “best practices” to reduce disparities, 3. case-‐‑based learning to master complexity, and 4. a web-‐‑based database to monitor outcomes. The ECHO model develops knowledge and capacity among community clinicians through on-‐‑going telementoring and education.
Force Multiplication Refers to an exponential increase in workforce capacity created through the ECHO
model. Utilizing telementoring and guided practice ECHO builds system capacity by empowering primary care providers to gain new knowledge and expertise to treat patients in their own communities.
Hub Regional center where multidisciplinary team of subject matter experts for a
teleECHO clinic is located.
iECHO Project ECHO’s web-‐‑based partner relations management tool that is used to
manage teleECHO clinics, collect data on teleECHO clinic participation, and provide online resources to partners.
Introduction This is a 90-‐‑minute video conference session that consists of a 45-‐‑minute
presentation by Dr. Sanjeev Arora or his designee followed by a 45-‐‑minute question and answer session: describing how ECHO started, how it is implemented, and the next steps for starting a teleECHO clinic.
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Immersion Three-‐‑day in-‐‑depth training for those that are ready to implement the ECHO model and have signed Project ECHO’s partnership documents. Allows partners to delve deeper into skills and resources needed while developing ongoing relationships with ECHO staff to allow for successful replication.
IT Support Techs Project ECHO It employee dedicated to managing and coordinating participant technological connections to the teleECHO clinics.
Knowledge Networks
Consists of regularly scheduled teleECHO clinics that bring together expert inter-‐‑ disciplinary specialists and community-‐‑based partners.
Learning Loops The sharing of knowledge between experts and community partners through
active participation in teleECHO clinics.
MetaECHO™ Community
Refers to the ever-‐‑expanding community of individuals and organizations using the ECHO model to help demonopolize expert knowledge.
Mock TeleECHO™ Clinic (Mock ECHO)
Simulated teleECHO clinics that are designed to prepare hub team members for launching live teleECHO clinics.
Orientation Full day of presentations on the ECHO model in Albuquerque, NM including the
mission/model, IT and ECHO applications, implementation next steps, evaluation, and snapshots of ECHO programs.
Project ECHO® Refers to the overall movement to implement the ECHO model, including the
ECHO Institute.
Replication Implementation and adaption of the ECHO model based on community needs and
resources with training and technical assistance from the ECHO Institute and other superhubs.
Replication Partner Coordinator (RPC)
This expert on the ECHO model provides direction to partners with next steps and individualized attention that is crucial to considering details involved in launching a new and successful ECHO program.
Session Refers to an individual teleECHO clinic occurrence.
Spoke Community partner site at which individual or team of learners is located and
connects to hub via teleECHO clinics.
Superhub Project ECHO partner that has the ability to sign partnership documents, train,
and provide ongoing support to replication partners in the same way that the ECHO Institute’s Replication Team does. These teams will receive a special superhub training of immersion plus an additional week focused on a train-‐‑the-‐‑ trainer method for the teams to learn to recruit, teach, and support replication partners through the implementation process.
TeleECHO™ Clinic Term used to describe regularly scheduled videoconferencing sessions which include subject matter experts and learners who use the ECHO model, didactic presentations and case-‐‑based learning to create learning loops. TeleECHO clinics are a core feature of the ECHO model.
TeleECHO™ Clinic Manager
Project ECHO manager, often with healthcare experience, who assists in curriculum development for the educational and training component of the teleECHO clinic, assists in coordinating teleECHO clinic functions and provides managerial support to the teleECHO clinic coordinators.
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TeleECHO™ Clinic Coordinator
Someone who is responsible for the administrative and organizational component of a teleECHO clinic; as well as provide guidance information to teleECHO clinic participants and teleECHO clinic guest speakers.
Telementoring Term used to describe the guided mentoring relationship that develops during a
teleECHO clinic using videoconferencing technology.
UNMHSC University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, where the ECHO Institute is
based in Albuquerque, NM.
VTC Video teleconferencing; participation in teleECHO clinics via video connection.
Zoom Teleconferencing software used for teleECHO clinics.
Source: ECHO Institute, 2016.
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Exhibit 1 Map of the United States
Source: http://www.drodd.com/html7/50-states-map.html
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Exhibit 2 Average Physician Salaries and Physician-to-Population Ratios in the US by Medical Specialty
Specialty Average Salary (2016; USD)
Number of Americans per Physician (2013)
Orthopedics 443,000 16,317
Cardiology 410,000 14,365
Dermatology 381,000 27,821
Gastroenterology 380,000 23,200
Radiology 375,000 11,466
Urology 367,000 32,345
Anesthesiology 360,000 7,756
Plastic surgery 355,000 45,539
Oncology 329,000 22,951
General surgery 322,000 12,551
Emergency medicine 322,000 8,489
Ophthalmology 309,000 17,259
Critical care 306,000 35,794
Pulmonary medicine 281,000 55,209
Ob/Gyn 277,000 7,743
Nephrology 273,000 33,652
Pathology 266,000 23,058
Neurology 241,000 24,029
Rheumatology 234,000 59,012
Psychiatry 226,000 8,476
Internal medicine 222,000 2,847
Allergy 222,000 70,188
HIV/ID 215,000 39,755
Family medicine 207,000 2,902
Endocrinology 206,000 48,493
Pediatrics 204,000 1,622
Note: Salaries reflect annual compensation for patient care, including salary, bonus, and profit-sharing contributions (earnings after taxes and deductible business expenses, but before income tax). Source: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2016; Association of American Medical Colleges, 2014
Physician Specialty Data Book.
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Exhibit 3 Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) in the US by State, September 2016
Location Total Primary Care HSPA Designations
Percent of Need Met
Practitioners Needed to Remove HSPA Designation
United States 6,397 ~57% 8,404 Alabama 84 74.34% 152 Alaska 82 34.94% 22 Arizona 160 52.09% 417 Arkansas 82 62.76% 55 California 573 61.17% 802 Colorado 119 50.88% 153
Connecticut 39 12.50% 121 Delaware 9 93.84% 4
District of Columbia 15 50.40% 43 Florida 256 40.55% 1,014 Georgia 207 54.36% 334 Hawaii 24 61.58% 7 Idaho 98 61.95% 57 Illinois 229 59.86% 439 Indiana 117 74.30% 144 Iowa 122 63.47% 77 Kansas 159 65.24% 68
Kentucky 144 68.69% 96 Louisiana 124 77.82% 143 Maine 68 46.29% 16
Maryland 50 54.89% 169 Massachusetts 69 65.34% 58
Michigan 326 65.49% 222 Minnesota 119 52.68% 63 Mississippi 109 59.21% 228 Missouri 216 30.16% 357 Montana 111 53.18% 38 Nebraska 109 41.79% 5 Nevada 75 51.57% 81
New Hampshire 30 54.90% 13 New Jersey 101 40.90% 164 New Mexico 179 43.46% 608 New York 28 48.47% 12
North Carolina 141 53.29% 212 North Dakota 77 36.66% 30
Ohio 138 68.16% 144 Oklahoma 179 60.03% 160 Oregon 113 55.92% 136
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Pennsylvania 159 63.70% 88 Rhode Island 15 32.75% 37 South Carolina 92 68.96% 156 South Dakota 87 44.29% 31 Tennessee 119 71.95% 116 Texas 425 66.43% 572 Utah 57 66.83% 59
Vermont 31 43.86% 1 Virginia 105 66.83% 131
Washington 155 45.42% 231 West Virginia 107 69.65% 30 Wisconsin 125 70.11% 77 Wyoming 39 69.76% 11
Note: The US government uses Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) designations to identify areas and population groups within the US that are experiencing a shortage of health professionals. According to federal regulations, an area must have a population-to-provider ratio of a certain threshold in order to be considered as having a shortage of providers. For primary medical care, the population to provider ratio must be at least 3,500 to 1 (3,000 to 1 if there are unusually high needs in the community). Source: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2016, available at: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/primary-care-
health-professional-shortage-areas- hpsas/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22as c%22%7D.
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Exhibit 4 Examples of Incentive Programs to Reduce Health Care Provider Shortages in Rural Areas
Federal Programs: National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Offers both scholarship and loan-‐‑repayment programs for physicians Area Health Education Centers (AHECs) Program: Supports partnerships between community organizations and schools of medicine and nursing to recruit and train students for health careers and place them in community-‐‑based primary care clinics; facilitates continuing education for health professionals in rural and underserved areas.
Scope/Impact: Provided more than 50 grants in 2016
National Health Service Corps (NHSC): Offers scholarship (tuition, fees, living expenses) and loan-‐‑ repayment programs for physicians and primary care providers who commit to practicing in underserved rural and urban areas. Following graduation, scholarship recipients spend between two and four years at a community-‐‑based clinic in a health professional shortage area (HPSA). The loan-‐‑repayment program places fully trained PCPs in HPSAs for two years in exchange for up to USD 60,000 in loan repayment, or for up to USD 170,000 if they stay for five years.
Scope/Impact: 180 recipients in 2016; a 2012 study found that 82% of NHSC clinicians continued to practice in underserved communities for up to one year after service completion, and 55% of NHSC clinicians continued practicing in underserved areas 10 years after service completion
Improving Rural Health Care Initiative: Funds residency programs that place residents in a rural setting for at least one year; administers a rural health workforce grant program that supports medical students and residents working in rural areas.
Scope/Impact: 39 students were placed at 49 rural centers in 2013 Title VII of the Public Health Service Act: Provides funding for leaders in primary care, faculty development programs, innovative curricula development, and several residency programs that train physicians for rural or inner-‐‑city service.
Scope/Impact: Data not available
Indian Health Service (IHS) Scholarship Program: Provides health professional training scholarships to students of American Indian or Alaskan Native background in exchange for a minimum two-‐‑year service commitment within an IHS program in the students’ chosen health field.
Scope/Impact: 1,200 applicants annually (average), from which the program selects ~150 awardees; as of 2016, approximately 7,000 students had received scholarships, with many pursuing careers within HIS or their tribal communities Medicare HPSA Bonus Payment: Provides a 10% bonus payment (paid quarterly, based on the amount paid for services) to PCPs and psychiatrists when they furnish Medicare-‐‑covered services to beneficiaries in a HPSA.
Scope/Impact: Data not available Exchange Visitor Program: Waives the two-‐‑year foreign residency requirement for foreign physicians with J-‐‑1 visas in exchange for three years of work in areas with primary care and/or mental health professional shortages.
Scope/Impact: Data not available
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Conrad State 30 Program: Allows each state 30 visa waivers for foreign physicians who commit to serving in a HPSA.
Scope/Impact: 300+ physicians are recommended for visa waivers in rural communities each year
State Programs: State Loan Repayment Program (SLRP): Requires physicians to serve in a public or nonprofit health care delivery setting for at least two years in order to qualify for loan repayment aid.
Scope/Impact: Varies by state
NHSC Student/Resident Experiences and Rotations in Community Health (SEARCH): Offered by roughly half of US states, allows health professional trainees to complete a clinical rotation in an underserved community.
Scope/Impact: Data not available
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): Provides funding for medical residency programs, including family medicine residencies that require residents to spend part of their training in rural underserved areas.
Scope/Impact: Data not available Individual State Rural Physician Scholarship Programs: Certain states operate special programs to provide financial support and faculty/physician mentorship to students interested in practicing in rural areas.
Scope/Impact: Varies by state
Source: Compiled by case writers using the following sources: AMA Journal of Ethics, “Federal and State
Initiatives to Recruit Physicians to Rural Areas;” AMA Journal of Ethics, “Closing the Gap: Finding and Encouraging Physicians Who Will Care for the Underserved?”; National Conference of State Legislators, “Closing the Gaps in the Rural Primary Care Workforce”; Commonwealth Fund, “States in Action Archive”; Health Resources and Services Administration, “Health Professional Shortage Areas & Medically Underserved Areas/Populations”; US Department of Health and Human Services, “Testimony on Improving Federal Health Care in Rural America: Developing the Workforce and Building Partnerships.”
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Exhibit 5 Results of Project ECHO Provider Surveys, 2006 and 2007
Annual Survey of Clinicians Participating in ECHO HCV Clinic, 2006 N=17
Rating Scale from 1 to 5 1=Not at all to 5=To a Large Degree
Mean score (1–5)
ECHO has diminished my professional isolation. 4.3 My participation in ECHO has enhanced my professional satisfaction. 4.8 Collaboration among agencies in ECHO is a benefit to my clinic. 4.9 ECHO has expanded access to HCV treatment for patients in our community. 4.9 In general, access to specialist expertise and consultation is a major area of need for me and my clinic.
4.9
Access to HCV specialist expertise and consultation is a major area of need for me and my clinic.
4.9
Community Clinician Assessment of Self-‐‑Efficacy* in HCV Patient Care (ECHO Annual Survey, 2006 and 2007)
N=25 Before Participation,
Mean After 1 Year of
Participation, Mean
Ability to identify patients who should be screened for HCV 4.2 6.4 Ability to identify suitable candidates for treatment for HCV 2.8 5.6 Ability to assess severity of liver disease in patients with HCV 3.2 5.5 Ability to treat patients with HCV and manage side effects 2.0 5.2 Ability to educate clinic staff about patients with HCV 2.8 5.8 Ability to educate and motivate patients with HCV 3.0 5.7 Ability to assess and manage psychiatric comorbidities in patients with HCV
2.6 5.1
Ability to assess and manage substance abuse comorbidities in patients with HCV
2.6 4.7
Ability to serve as a consultant within my clinic and in locality for HCV questions/issues
2.4 5.6
Overall competence (average of nine items above) 2.8± 5.5± *Provider self-efficacy: Twenty-five clinicians participating in the ECHO HCV clinics related their knowledge, skills, or competence in HCV prior to and after approximately 1 year of participation. Providers rated themselves, both retrospectively and currently, on a seven-point scale (1 = None or no skill at all; 2 = Vague knowledge, skills or competence; 3 = Slight knowledge, skills or competence; 4 = Average among my peers; 5 = Competent; 6 = Very competent; 7 = Expert, teach others). Note: See original source (citation below) for standard deviation values, p values, and effect sizes. Source: Arora et al. Expanding access to hepatitis C virus treatment—Extension for Community Healthcare
Outcomes (ECHO) Project: Disruptive innovation in specialty care. Hepatology. 2010:52(3): 1124- 1133. doi:10.1002/hep.23802.
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Exhibit 6 Suggested Anatomy of a TeleECHO Clinic, May 2016
1. Brief Planning Huddle 2. Introductions
a. Video participants b. Telephone participants c. Hub and in-‐‑person participants
3. Announcements a. Updates b. Audience questions and concerns
4. Brief Didactic (30 minutes or less) 5. Patient Case Presentation
a. Hub facilitator introduces the presenter (Example: “Dr. Jones, you have a case today. Please present your case.”
b. Spoke presenter presents the case c. Facilitator invites other team members at spoke to comment/elaborate on the case d. Hub facilitator summarizes presentation e. Hub facilitator ensures with presenter the summary is accurate (Example: “Dr. Jones, did I
summarize this case correctly?”) 6. Hub/ECHO asks audience for questions
a. No recommendations for diagnosis or treatment at this point b. Video participants c. Telephone participants d. Hub/ECHO Core Group e. Facilitator draws out comment from participants who are not medical providers
7. Hub/ECHO asks audience for recommendations and impressions a. Diagnosis or further workup b. Non-‐‑pharmacological recommendations c. Pharmacological recommendations d. Interventional recommendations e. Facilitator draws out comment from participants who are not medical providers
8. Hub/ECHO summarizes recommendations and consensus on diagnosis and treatment plan a. Asks presenter if his or her questions have been adequately addressed b. Invites presenter to represent in the future and sets a tentative date for a follow-‐‑up presentation
9. Close and Debrief a. All facilitators on the “hub” team should review and comment on the flow and facilitation of
the session, with an eye to self-‐‑reflection and issues that may not have been obvious in the moment
Helpful Recommendations
1. The speaker should always introduce him or herself. 2. Help direct the case discussion if presenter is unable to focus or long-‐‑winded. 3. Look for “teachable moments” to impart important knowledge to participants. 4. Always treat participants with respect and address critical comments appropriately.
Source: ECHO Institute.
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Exhibit 7 ECHO Institute Organizational Chart, July 2016
Note: Team member totals include 11 vacant positions as of July 2016.
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Exhibit 8 Budget Template for New TeleECHO Clinics in the US, Spring 2016
PART 1: Budget Template for Building a TeleECHO Clinic in the United States (in USD) US Costs Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Notes
Personnel for Running TeleECHO Clinic
This core team can support between
1–4 teleECHO clinics.
IT User Support (0.5–1.0) 32,500 32,500 32,500 Coordinator/
Administrator (1.0) 17,800 17,800 17,800
Medical Director (Nurse or MD) (0.5) 32,000 32,000 32,000
Hub Expert Clinical Team See cost assumptions below for %
effort recommended. Disease Expert 50,000 50,000 50,000 Pharmacist 20,000 20,000 20,000
Behavioral Health Specialist 20,000 20,000 20,000
Evaluation Expert/ Researcher 14,800 14,800 14,800 See cost assumptions below for %
effort recommended. Subtotal 187,100 187,100 187,100
Replication Training at ECHO Institute, UNM (Albuquerque) Travel for 5 team members (avg. air fare USD 350 round-‐‑trip) 3,250 0 0 Hotel for 5 team members × 4
nights (USD 100/night) 2,500 0 0 Training costs for ECHO
institute (see TA line item below) Free Free Free Food during ECHO training
(breakfast, lunch, most dinners) Free Free Free Subtotal 5,750 0 0
Equipment-‐‑Teleconferencing
Additional needs depend on size of teleECHO clinic and room.
Teleconferencing hardware for hub (select from PART 3
medium or small conf. setup) 3,800 0 0 High-‐‑speed internet (Hub) 400 0 0
Teleconferencing software (Zoom)
Free Free
Zoom is free through June 2016 for partners. Partners who use other software need to include the cost.
ECHO Clinic Management Software (iECHO) Free Free Free
This service is free to ECHO partners.
ECHO Patient Presentation & Outcomes Tracking Software Free Free Free
This service is called iHealth and is free to ECHO partners.
Subtotal 4,200 0 0
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Recruitment by Hub of Spoke Participants
Recruitment trips: Food, gas, hotel for 10 trips to 10 clinics in
selected geographic area 5,000 0 0 Continuing Medical Education
(CME) Credit** 2,000 2,000 2,000 This may be called something else
outside of the US. Subtotal 7,000 2,000 2,000 Evaluation
Using iECHO/ iHealth Tools Free Free Free Fee to ECHO partners. Survey Monkey or other online
survey tools 350 350 350 Other (see menu below) Variable Variable Variable
Subtotal 350 350 350 TOTAL 188,400 173,450 173,450
Other possible costs to consider 1/2 day training mini conference
for spoke leaders at hub Variable Curriculum development per
disease/focus area Variable Variable Variable 3G internet service for Spokes
(400*#Spokes) Variable Variable Variable Technical Assistance for TA from ECHO Institute @UNM
Small ECHO projects (training 0– 5 people, 1 hub, limited TA) Free Free Free
Medium-‐‑sized projects (training up to 30 people over two years)
200,000 over two years: 75% year 1, 25% year 2
Small ECHO projects and partners in developing countries receive free
TA. However, we request that larger projects and partners writing
grants help support ECHO’s training costs by writing the ECHO Institute into the grant for project planning and start-‐‑up costs. The amount typically depends on the anticipated size of the project and
ability to pay. Large-‐‑system or statewide
projects (see Technical Assistant Menu Document) Variable Variable Variable Contact Replication Team for details
PART 2: Cost Assumptions
Staff Annual Salary FTE
Nurse Manager salary 65,000 0.5 IT user support 35,600 0.5
U sa
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Administrative Coordinator 32,000 1 Medical Director/Specialist
(endocrine, GI, etc.) 250,000 0.2 Pharmacist 100,000 0.2 Behavioral
Psychologist/Psychiatrist 100,000 0.2 Evaluation Expert 74,000 0.2
Project ECHO Training @UNM ECHO Institute, Albuquerque
Number of people sent to train at ECHO Institute UNM
5 people
This assumes that a team of 5 people will be coming for 4 nights. This also assumes travel within the US. International travel will obviously
incur more costs. Average cost for round-‐‑trip
flight 650 Average cost hotel per night 125
Average number of nights stay for training 4 nights
PART 3: Determining Teleconferencing Equipment Needs
Teleconferencing equipment Unit Cost Quantity Total
For medium sized conference room (20–40 people)
Logitech cc3000e plus (camera, mic, speaker) 1,000 1 1,000
TV stands (recommended 2 TVs, @$200 each) 200 2 400
Computer (to run camera and zoom) 1,000 1 1,000
2 55"ʺ televisions 700 2 1,400 TOTAL 3,800
3G broadband facilities charge for hub 400 1 400
** CME cost number updated to $2,000/year based on ECHO Institute staff input. Source: ECHO Institute, September 2016.
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Exhibit 9 Project ECHO Funding (USD) by Source and Fiscal Year (FY), 2004–2015
FY 04–FY 12 FY 13 FY 14 FY 15
Federal 6,490,027 3,376,046 3,703,101 4,099,558 State and MCO*
14,350,154 1,208,121 1,602,892 3,757,552
Foundation 5,479,736 9,836,986 6,581,292 13,551,190 Total 26,319,917 14,421,153 11,887,285 21,408,300
*Managed Care Organization Source: ECHO Institute, 2016.
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Exhibit 10 Project ECHO Implementing Partners, Spring 2016
Group Location Topic
US-‐‑Based Projects
Albertina Kerr
Portland, OR Developmental Disabilities
Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center
Houston, TX Advanced Liver Disease, Cardiology, HBV, HCV, Infectious Disease
Behavior Change Institute
Oakland, CA Autism
Billings Clinic Billings, MT Behavioral Health for Corrections, Addictions/Psychiatry ECHO for Corrections
Cherokee Nation at Hastings Hospital
Tahlequah, OK HCV
Cincinnati Children'ʹs Hospital Medical Center
Cincinnati, OH STORM (Sickle Cell Treatment & Outcomes Research in the Midwest) Community Health
Center, Inc.
Middletown, CT Chronic Pain, Coaches International—supporting Quality Improvement and Specialists, HIV, HCV, Opioid Addiction – Buprenorphine
Georgia AAP Chapter
Atlanta, GA Pediatric Growth and Endocrinology
Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boston, MA Gerontology – ECHO Age
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, MD Sickle Cell Disease
Kansas University Medical Center / Children’s Mercy Hospital
Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS
Children and Youth with Epilepsy
LA Net Los Angeles, CA Geriatrics
Maimonides
New York, NY Pediatric Epilepsy
Migrant Clinicians Network
Texas Managing Ambulatory Health Care
Missouri Telehealth Network/University of Missouri
Columbia, MO Autism, Asthma, Chronic Pain, Endocrinology
New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator
Albuquerque, NM
Medicolegal Death Investigation
Ochsner Health System
New Orleans, MA Liver Disease Management
Oregon Health and Science University/Health Share of Oregon
Portland, OR Psychiatric Medication Management
Parents Reaching Out Albuquerque, NM Parent Advocacy for Children with Disabilities
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ResolutionCare Eureka, CA Palliative Care
St. Joseph’s Hospital & Medical Center
Phoenix, AZ HCV
Trinitas Regional Medical Center
Elizabeth, NJ IDD population (intellectual and developmental disabilities)
University of California Davis
Davis, CA Pain Management
University of California at San Francisco
San Francisco, CA HCV
University of Chicago Chicago, IL Children and Youth with Epilepsy, HCV, Hypertension, Risk Based Approach to Women’s Health, Pediatric ADHD, Pediatric Obesity and Comorbidities , Geriatric/Palliative, Pilot on Free & Charitable Projects
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine
Cincinnati, OH Chronic Pain
University of Colorado School of Public Health
Denver, CO Children and Youth with Epilepsy
University of Hawaii HI Endocrinology, Behavioral Health
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM Chronic Pain and Headache Management, Community Health Worker Training Initiatives, Complex Care, Endocrinology, Epilepsy Across a Lifespan, HCV, HCV Corrections, HIV, IHS HCV, IHS HIV, Integrated Addictions and Psychiatry, NM Department of Health TB, NM Peer Education Project, Nurse Practitioner/Certified Nurse-‐‑ Midwife, Rheumatology, Women’s Health and Genomics, Improving Clinical Flow Pilot
University of New Mexico: Center for Development and Disability
Albuquerque, NM India Autism ECHO Program
University of New Mexico: Envision NM
Albuquerque, NM Childhood Overweight Medical Management, Pediatric Nutrition, Pediatric Asthma/Pulmonary
University of Nevada Reno, NV Antibiotic Stewardship, Autism, Diabetes/General Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Pain Management, Primary Care and Behavioral Health, Mental Health, Rheumatology, Special Series, Sports Medicine
University of Rochester Medical Center
Rochester, NY Geriatric Health in Long Term Care, Palliative Care in Primary Care, Palliative Care in Long Term Care, Geriatric Mental Health in Primary Care, General Psychology, Eating Disorder
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University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT Behavioral Health, Chronic Pain & Headache Management, HCV, High Risk Obstetrics, Liver Care, Immune Disorders of the Gut, Internal Medicine/ Pediatrics Residency, Interprofessional Education (Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Social Work, Wellness/Nutrition), UU Community Clinics Headache, UU Community Clinics HCV, Pregnancy Care, Post-‐‑partum Hemorrhage, Identifying & Managing Patients at Risk for Cancer, Nursing Education, Burn and Soft Tissue Injury
University of Washington Seattle, WA Chronic Pain, HCV, HIV, HIV Public Health,
Multiple Sclerosis, NW Heart Failure Collaborative
University of Wyoming / Wyoming Institute for Disabilities
Laramie, WY Assistive Technologies in Education
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX Cervical Cancer Prevention, Management of Cervical and Breast Cancer (in Mozambique and in Zambia), Tobacco Cessation in Mental Health Facilities
Visiting Nurses Association Health Group
Red Bank, NJ Care Transition
Western NY Collaborative/AKA Excellus Blue Cross BS
Rochester, NY Behavioral Health
West Virginia University/Cabin Creek Health Systems
West Virginia HCV
Veteran’s Health Administration
12 hubs around the U.S.
Behavioral/Mental Health, Cardiology, Chronic Pain, Dermatology, Endocrinology/Diabetes, Epilepsy, Hepatitis C, HIV/AIDS, Infectious Disease, Liver Care, Neurology, Nephrology, Nursing, Otolaryngology, Pulmonary/Asthma, Sleep Medicine, Spinal Cord Injury/Plastics, Surgery, Transgender, Transplant, Urology, Vascular Medicine, Women’s Health
Department of Defense Army
Eastern Region Medical Command
Landstuhl RMC – Germany
Chronic Pain
Northern Region Medical Command at Womack AMC
Fort Bragg, NC Chronic Pain
U sa
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Pacific Region Medical Command at Tripler AMC
Honolulu, HI Chronic Pain
Southern Region Medical Command at Dwight D Eisenhower AMC
Fort Gordon, GA Chronic Pain
Air Force
USAF Diabetes Center of Excellence
San Antonio, TX Diabetes
Navy
NAVMED East
Navy Medical Center Portsmouth
Chronic Pain
NAVMED West Navy Medical Center Dan Diego
Chronic Pain
Internationally Based Projects
Adizes Institute
Mexico Business Consulting
Ambience Public School
Delhi, India Teacher Mentorship
Amor-‐‑Pro TB, Puentes de Esperanza, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Cure TB/San Diego County TB Control Branch
Mexico, California, Texas, New Mexico
US-‐‑MX Border TB Initiative
CAMH Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Toronto, Canada Behavioral Health
Health and Social Care Board Northern Ireland
Belfast, Northern Island
Dermatology for GP Trainees, Carers, Diabetes, Ophthalmology
Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre
Porto Alegre, Brazil HCV
Hospital Eva Peron
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dermatology, Psoriasis
Hospital Italiano
Buenos Aires, Argentina
HCV
Institute for Cytology and Preventive Oncology (ICPO) and Karuna Trust
Karnataka, India
Cancer Screening and Prevention for Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers and Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs)
Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences
New Delhi, India Liver Diseases
Jamaican Ministry of Health
Mandeville, Jamaica
Chronic Disease Prevention and Management
Karuna Trust
Bangalore, India Maternal and Child Health Clinic
Lair Centre Vancouver, Canada HCV
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Namibia Ministry of Health and Social Services (MOHSS)
Windhoek, Namibia
HIV
National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) at B.J. Medical College
Ahmedabad, India
HIV
National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) at Maulana Azad Medical College
New Delhi, India HIV
National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS)
Bangalore, India Mental Health and Drug Addiction, Mental Health during Pregnancy and Postpartum,
Road to Recovery
Northern Ireland Hospice
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Community Hospice Nurse Specialist Clinic
Ontario Pain ECHO
Queens University & University of Toronto Ontario, Canada
Chronic Pain
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Dementia and Depression
Reaching You Egypt HCV, Cardiology, Pulmonary
Royal College of Surgeons Ireland
Ireland Rheumatology
St. James’ Hospital Dublin, Ireland HCV
St. Michaels’ Hospital Toronto, Canada Substance Use Disorders
Universidad Austral
Buenos Aires, Argentina
HCV
Universidad de la República
Montevideo, Uruguay Anemia, Autism, Cervical Cancer, Heart Failure, HCV, Palliative Care
Vietnam National Lung Hospital
Hanoi, Vietnam Tuberculosis (TB)
West/North West Hospitals Group
Galway, Ireland Diabetes U sa
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Exhibit 11 Examples of Nonmedical Project ECHO Programs
University of Wyoming Project ECHO, Wyoming Institute for Disabilities
The Wyoming Institute for Disabilities (WIND) saw how academic medical centers were using Project ECHO to improve medical outcomes and wanted to try using it to improve education outcomes. Wyoming had slightly higher developmental disability rates among school-‐‑age children than the national average but few special education and child behavior specialists. WIND became a Project ECHO hub in 2013 and a superhub in 2015. As of August 2016, WIND operated seven Project ECHO programs:
♦ Assistive technology: Provides training and best practices to support educators and service providers at 103 spoke sites nationwide in considering, implementing, and evaluating the use of assistive technologies (any device that helps a person with a disability complete an everyday task) to improve outcomes for students.
♦ Educational leadership: Provides a mentoring platform for school district superintendents and leaders to improve community, district, and student outcomes. Didactic topics include teacher and staff evaluations, school board elections, grading policy development, curriculum mapping, and program evaluation.
♦ Autism: Provides professional development, program planning resources, and ongoing support for educators and other professionals working with students with autism. Didactic topics include diagnostic guidelines and tools, current research review, behavior management and intervention, data collection tips, and visual supports and structure in the classroom.
♦ Geriatrics: Provides support for providers who care for geriatric patients, including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, medical assistants, pharmacists, social workers, case managers, mental health staff, and occupational and physical therapists.
♦ Behavior supports: Provides professional development, behavior support planning resources, and ongoing support for educators and other professionals working with students exhibiting behavioral challenges in schools.
♦ Secondary transition: Provides ongoing support for educators and state and local agencies working with students transitioning from K–12 education systems into postsecondary education, employment, and community living settings.
♦ Waiver services: Provides support for service providers and other professionals working with Medicaid populations who have advanced or unique needs, including children with mental health issues, people with developmental disabilities, and people in long-‐‑term care.
Source: University of Wyoming, http://www.uwyo.edu/wind/echo/.
Crisis Intervention Team TeleECHO Clinic, University of New Mexico
In collaboration with the Albuquerque Police Department and with a three-‐‑year grant from the US Department of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, UNM began piloting a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) teleECHO clinic in January 2016. Its goal was to improve law enforcement interactions with people living with mental illness in New Mexico—especially in rural areas—by reducing the use of police force, fostering connections between law enforcement and the mental health system, and building trust and collaboration between law enforcement and local communities. Led by the addictions psychiatrist who
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codirected the ECHO Institute’s chronic pain and headache management clinics, the CIT ECHO clinic convened law enforcement professionals weekly to discuss strategies for intervening in situations involving people with mental illness. In May 2016, there were 11 participating law enforcement agencies. Participants called in from their offices in Albuquerque and across the state and included police officers, detectives, probation officers, emergency responders, and Albuquerque Police Department officers who specialized in supporting people in crisis (e.g., chronically homeless, mentally ill). They shared advice and resources based on their experience, and the psychiatrist provided recommendations based on his clinical expertise and experience. Case discussions focused on using the approach and tactics of the national Crisis Intervention Team policing movement (in which several participants were certified), including identifying mental illness, using de-‐‑escalation skills, diverting individuals from jail to hospitals, connecting individuals with mental health services, and improving connections with the community at large. The CIT teleECHO clinic was not bound by HIPAA regulations because law enforcement officials, as opposed to health care providers, presented the cases. Participants used individuals’ names with the goal of improving inter-‐‑agency collaboration across law enforcement jurisdictions.
Source: ECHO Institute, MetaECHO Conference 2016 Poster Session.
Improving Clinical Flow Pilot Program, University of New Mexico
Launched in August 2015 by the ECHO Institute and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), with funding from the GE Foundation, the Improving Clinical Flow TeleECHO Clinic aimed to help administrators and clinic staff in identify inefficiencies and waster and to design and implement quality improvement projects to address them. Fifteen FQHCs participated in two-‐‑hour weekly sessions facilitated by ECHO Institute and IHI staff. Together, the clinics served approximately 130,000 patients across the US. Seven faculty experts from across the US joined each week to provide input and recommendations and to deliver the didactic presentation (e.g., task-‐‑shifting). Their combined expertise included clinic administration, management, business strategy, data collection and analysis, change management, and organizational psychology. Participating clinics tracked data for 12 process and outcomes indicators and uploaded it monthly to a shared database.
Case presentations began with background on the clinic and an overview of how it was structured. The clinic team then stated the question or problem they needed help with and described what they had tried thus far to resolve it themselves (e.g., “We recently lost four physicians, and here is how we have coped so far …”). They also outlined what data they had related to the issue and any Plan-‐‑Do-‐‑Study-‐‑Act (PDSA) cycles they were implementing to test possible solutions. The teleECHO clinic format was as follows:
♦ Participant introductions
♦ Case 1: Case presentation, clarifying questions from FQHC participants and expert faculty, recommendations from participants and faculty, discussion summary
♦ 30-‐‑minute didactic presentation
♦ Case 2: Case presentation, clarifying questions from FQHC participants and expert faculty, recommendations from participants and faculty, discussion summary
♦ Office hours (remaining 10–15 minutes)
Source: ECHO Institute.
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Exhibit 12 Selection of Peer-Reviewed Publications on the Impact of Project ECHO
2007–2011 • Academic health center management of chronic diseases through knowledge networks: Project
ECHO. Academic Medicine. Arora et al. • Project ECHO: Linking university specialists with rural and prison-‐‑based clinicians to improve care
for people with chronic hepatitis C in New Mexico. Public Health Reports. Arora et al. • Expanding access to hepatitis C virus treatment – Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes
(ECHO) project: disruptive innovation in specialty care. Hepatology. Arora et al. • Outcomes of treatment for hepatitis C virus infection by primary care providers. The New England
Journal of Medicine. Arora et al. • Partnering urban academic medical centers and rural primary care clinicians to provide complex
chronic disease care. Health Affairs. Arora et al. 2012
• Building capacity to reduce disparities in diabetes: training community health workers using an integrated distance learning model. The Diabetes Educator. Colleran et al.
• Project ECHO: A model for complex chronic care in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. NIH Public Access. Scott et al.
• Using an established telehealth model to train urban primary care providers on hypertension management. Journal of Clinical Hypertension. Masi et al.
• Knowledge networks for treating complex diseases in remote, rural, and underserved communities. Learning Trajectories, Innovation and Identity for Professional Development, Innovation, and Change in Professional Education (book). Arora et al.
• Antimicrobial stewardship on the frontier: A pilot study of training using an electronic learning network. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. Kellie SM.
2013
• Evaluating the role of key learning theories in ECHO: A telehealth educational program for primary care providers. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education and Action. Socolovsky et al.
• Making connections: Using telehealth to improve the diagnosis and treatment of complex regional pain syndrome, an underrecognized neuroinflammatory disorder. Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology. Katzman JG.
• Teaching by telementoring. Project ECHO advancing physicians’ skillsets. Modern Healthcare. Zigmond J.
• Project ECHO: The force multiplier for pain education and management. Painview. • Project ECHO: Replicating a novel model to enhance access to hepatitis C care in a community
health center. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Khatri et al. 2014
• Demonopolizing medical knowledge. Academic Medicine. Arora et al. • Rules and values: A coordinated regulatory and educational approach to the public health crises of
chronic pain and addiction. American Journal of Public Health. Katzman et al. • Expanding primary care capacity to treat hepatitis C virus infection through an evidence-‐‑based care
model – Arizona and Utah, 2012–2014. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Mitruka et al.
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• Innovative telementoring for pain management: Project ECHO Pain. Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions. Katzman et al.
• ECHO-‐‑AGE: An innovative model of geriatric care for long-‐‑term care residents with dementia and behavioral issues. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. Catic et al.
• The educational impact of the specialty care access network – Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes program. Telemedicine and e-‐‑Health. Salgia et al.
• Technology enhanced learning in addiction mental health: Developing a virtual knowledge network: NIMHANS ECHO. IEEE. Chand et al.
• U.S. Air Force telehealth initiative to assist primary care providers in the management of diabetes. Clinical Diabetes. Swigert et al.
2015 • Access to outpatient specialty care: Solutions from an integrated health care system. American
Journal of Medical Quality. Kirsh et al. • Supporting and improving community health services—A prospective evaluation of ECHO
technology in community palliative care nursing teams. BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care. White et al. • ECHO Ontario chronic pain and opioid stewardship: Providing access and building capacity for
primary care providers in underserved, rural, and remote communities. Global Telehealth 2015: Integrating Technology and Information for Better Healthcare. Dubin et al.
• Evaluation of a telementoring intervention for pain management in the Veterans Health Administration. Pain Medicine. Frank et al.
• Utilizing the ECHO model in the Veteran’s Health Affairs System: Guidelines for setup, operations, and preliminary findings. Future Internet. Knapp et al.
• Teleconsultation and training of VHA providers on transgender care: Implementation of a multisite hub system. Telemedicine and E-‐‑Health. Kauth et al.
• Improved glycemic control in veterans with poorly controlled diabetes mellitus using a specialty care access network – Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes Model. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare. Watts et al.
• Project ECHO-‐‑AGE and nursing home quality of care. The Journal of Post-‐‑Acute and Long-‐‑Term Care Models. Gordon et al.
2016 (selection among 15 total publications)
• Impact of a telehealth program that delivers remote consultation and longitudinal mentorship to community HIV providers. Open Forum Infectious Diseases. Wood et al.
• Implementation of the ECHO telementoring model for the treatment of patients with Hepatitis C. Journal of Medical Virology. Marciano et al.
• Innovations at the interface of primary and specialty care: University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center initiatives. Association of American Medical Colleges (Special Report). Sandberg et al.
• ECHO Autism: A new model for training primary care providers in best-‐‑practice care for children with autism. Clinical Pediatrics. Mazurek et al.
• Bone Health ECHO: Telementoring to improve osteoporosis care. Women’s Health. Lewiecki et al. • Evaluation of American Indian Health Service training in pain management and opioid substance
use disorder. American Journal of Public Health. Katzman et al. • The impact of Project ECHO on participant and patient outcomes: A systematic review. Academic
Medicine. Zhou et al. • Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes): A new model for educating
primary care providers about treatment of substance use disorders. Substance Abuse. Komaromy et al.
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