I met Sanjeev Arora as part of the RWJ crowd at TEDMED last year and was pretty impressed with his approach–especially given the lack of access to care in poor and minority regions. Now there’s proof his approach works —Matthew Holt
On June 1 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study about how primary care providers can treat very sick patients who previously did not have access to specialty care. The piece described Project ECHO, a disruptive model of health care delivery based on collaborative practice that has the potential to transform health care. Supported by Robert Wood Johnson’s Pioneer Portfolio and based at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (UNMHSC), Project ECHO was developed by Sanjeev Arora, M.D., a hepatologist at UNMHSC and leading social innovator.
The ECHO model organizes community-based primary care clinicians into disease-specific knowledge networks that meet through weekly videoconferencing to present patient cases. These “virtual grand rounds” are led by specialists at academic medical centers who train providers to provide specialized care, share best practices and co-manage complex chronic illness care for patients with the local care team. Under this model, primary care providers treat patients in their own communities – burdens on academic center capacity are reduced, poor access to care is eliminated (patients are no longer limited by geography when seeking quality care), and the health care systems’ capacity to provide high quality care to more patients, sooner, is dramatically expanded.
In the NEJM study, patients with hepatitis C treated by primary care clinicians working through Project ECHO achieved results that were identical to patients treated by UNMHSC specialists. The evaluation also showed that the ECHO model can reduce racial and ethnic disparities in treatment outcomes.
