Project ECHO: Expanding the Capacity of Primary Care Providers to Address Complex
2017
This case describes a web-based model of “guided practice” for primary care providers that substantially reduced wait time and improved healthcare delivery for patients with hepatitis C in rural New Mexico between 2003 and 2016. It explores what motivated Sanjeev Arora, MD, to launch Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, or Project ECHO, and the rapid interest in replicating the ECHO model in other states and across medical conditions. It describes how the project works—by leveraging technology to expand access to specialty resources, best practices, case-based learning, and outcome monitoring, as well as goodwill among participants—and how public relations, research, and persistence supported Project ECHO’s growth. The case concludes with the U.S. Congress passing the ECHO Act in December 2016, to promote research on the model, and ways to potentially improve the process to reach Arora’s goal of touching 1 billion lives.
Learning Objectives: To understand what is needed to design a service model; the potential for redistribution of expertise among practitioners to enhance value; the role of operational effectiveness in enabling scale-up; and the importance of measuring impact for stakeholders.
The Global Health Delivery (GHD) Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, investigates the management decisions behind disease treatment and prevention globally. The Global Health Delivery (GHD) Case Collection is a set of teaching case studies that are available for all at no cost online through Harvard Business Publishing, GHDonline, and The Case Centre.
Project ECHO: Expanding the Capacity of Primary Care Providers to Address Complex
Source:
Madore A et al. Project Echo: Expanding the Capacity of Primary Care Providers to Address Complex Conditions. Global Health Delivery Project, Harvard Business Publishing 2017. https://www.globalhealthdelivery.org/case-collection/case-studies/north-america/project-echo-expanding-capacity-of-primary-care-providers.