Better than telemedicine? Program brings specialty training to rural health-care providers to help patients directly

A virtual mentoring program, Project ECHO (which stands for Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) aims to equip rural medical providers with more specialized expertise.

University of New Mexico internal-medicine physician Sanjeev Arora has spent "nearly two decades building the program, which now trains far-flung providers across the U.S. and other parts of the world," Erin Brodwin reports for Stat. "Every week, ECHO participants — often rural nurse practitioners or medical assistants — assemble over video conference to present a challenging patient case to a group of their peers and a team of ECHO specialists. It’s a chance to ask questions and get advice on care, including how to address social factors like housing and transportation. The work fills what experts see as a gaping need for specialty care in remote communities, where traditional forms of telehealth have failed to make inroads."

Arora calls the novel approach tele-mentoring, in a nod to its close cousin, telemedicine. "Rather than giving a single specialist a fish by connecting them to a rural patient, ECHO teaches multiple rural providers to fish by giving them the skills they need to treat scores of local patients," Baldwin reports.

Though telehealth has become more common in recent years, especially during the pandemic, it still can't help many rural patients who lack broadband and can't locally access specialists. The tele-mentoring approach is one way around that problem, according to RAND Corp.'s Ryan McBain. In 2019 McBain was the lead author on a systematic review of 52 studies about Project ECHO, Baldwin reports.