帝王会所

Project ECHO is a telementoring program that connects generalist community healthcare providers (participants or spokes) with multidisciplinary healthcare teams (hubs) to address health access and inequities. Started by Dr. Sanjeev Arora in 2005, has been adopted in more than 200 countries with 7,500 programs addressing various health challenges reaching around 7 million ECHO participants.

Project ECHO鈥檚 quick ascent means that more people across the globe are exchanging valuable health information and working together to tackle healthcare issues. Funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, 帝王会所 Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine Professor Nagesh Rao collaborated with his colleagues Sam Larson, Diffusion Associates, and Michigan State Professor Jim Dearing (Co-PIs), and Baruch College Professor Caryn Medved, to assess Project ECHO鈥檚 rapid diffusion. They shared insights from two of their recent publications.

Dr. Arora started Project ECHO to help physicians treat the medical needs of indigenous, rural and underserved populations. Care providers involved in Project ECHO also recognized that health care is not only medically based, it is influenced by culture. In one of his publishings, Rao and his colleagues explain that for over fifty years, research has either stressed the importance of healthcare providers learning about the patients鈥� diverse cultures (cultural competence) or argued that healthcare providers need to understand their own culture in treating patients (cultural humility).

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Rao and his colleagues use a new approach and propose The Culturally Adaptive Care Model arguing that cultural competence and cultural humility need to be simultaneously considered in providing effective patient care. They illustrate how Project ECHO can create the conditions that support culturally adaptive care.

鈥淧roviders have to learn about their own culture, they have to learn about the cultures of patients they are serving and know that the interaction between them is dynamic and constantly changing,鈥� Rao said.

In a BMC Medical Education publication, Larson, Dearing, Rao and Medved demonstrate that while Project ECHO focuses on enhancing the knowledge needs of community-based health care providers, specialists leading ECHO programs deepen their expertise, broaden their understanding of community-based care and reshape their approach to medical education and professional humility.

鈥淥verall, what was really important and fascinating about studying Project ECHO is uncovering the extent to which health access is an issue all over the world, but also that there are very creative, innovative ways to fill the gap between research and practice,鈥� explained Rao.

Rao says the ECHO Program model of telementoring and globally exchanging information across different cultures is being applied in new contexts.

鈥淪lowly we are seeing a lot of programs in education that are mimicking the ECHO model,鈥� Rao emphasized. 鈥淓ducators see telementoring as a model to provide quality education for people with limited access to resources.鈥�