In my role at the GE Foundation, I am lucky enough to meet pioneers with a global vision for health and sustainable development. What these leaders have in common is their unique ability to recruit others in their quest for societal change. Leadership begins with sharing a vision with many people in numerous communities from diverse walks of life.
This rare genius truly shines in Dr. Sanjeev Arora, the creator and founder of Project ECHO. In 2003 this collaborative learning model grew out of Dr. Arora’s frustration that he could serve only a fraction of patients in New Mexico with hepatitis C. At the time, he was one of the few liver disease specialists in the entire state of New Mexico, and arithmetically, he would never be able to care for those patients in time to have a difference in their health. So he conceived of and launched Project ECHO.
Simply put, Project ECHO is a new system for transferring specialty care knowledge to primary care providers. It’s medical rounds on steroids. At the start, a team of specialists with a deep knowledge of hepatitis C gathered virtually in a conference room at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. In that conference room would be a video screen with a matrix of individual primary care providers who were sitting in their own offices and clinics across New Mexico. Each provider would, in turn, present their patients with hepatitis C and get guidance on caring for each patient from the experts at the university hub. Each of the other providers learned from every case presentation.
Now, 13 years later, Project ECHO is more than a model; it has become a movement. It encapsulates 94 academic and expert hubs worldwide (58 in the United States and the rest in 16 other countries), and it covers more than 60 complex conditions.