Founder’s Message
Dear Friends,
More than two decades ago, we envisioned a world where everyone, everywhere, would have equitable access to quality health care. Thanks to you, the ECHO movement, this vision is being realized, and my gratitude for the work you do every day is boundless.
As we begin a new year, we’re honing our focus to ensure that we can meet the world’s ever-expanding challenges to improving health outcomes.
Maximizing ECHO’s Impact
In uncertain and tumultuous times like ours, I believe we must focus our efforts on doing the most we can with readily available resources. That is how I’m thinking about the future of Project ECHO. For many of the world’s most pressing health care challenges, we have inexpensive, generic, and freely available medicines and screenings. What’s missing is a trained and mentored workforce to deliver those treatments.
Project ECHO was made to address this challenge.
With your dedicated efforts, the ECHO Model has 700 peer-reviewed publications demonstrating efficacy and has emerged as the most evidence-based capacity-building platform in the world. By turning traditional training on its head, ECHO gives frontline health care workers mentorship and community while they gain the confidence to grow their expertise and take on more complicated cases.
Traditional training is like watering your garden once, then returning six months later expecting a bountiful harvest. But as we all know, a thriving garden needs constant care. ECHO is more like drip irrigation. With our low-dose/high-frequency approach to telementoring, we create a sustainable way to mentor community-based health workers as they gain the confidence to implement best practices. ECHO builds communities of practice that upskill the workforce faster, with lower costs and better results—all at a scale unachievable with traditional training.
Preventing the Most Preventable Deaths
Using the global trusted human network that you have helped build, we must now apply our focus to challenges that are all but solved – with the exception of the workforce necessary to deliver those solutions.
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)—such as diabetes, high cholesterol/blood pressure, heart attacks, and stroke—are the leading cause of death worldwide, disproportionately impacting poor and marginalized communities. These diseases widen health inequities, create unnecessary hardship, and result in early loss of life — even though screening and affordable, generic medicines are more available than ever.
This is simply unacceptable.
When the only intervention needed is expert knowledge and guided practice, the ECHO Model provides a ready-made, low-cost solution to equip community-based providers with the mentorship, community and best-practice expertise to save millions from preventable, treatable diseases, today.
The same principle holds true for maternal and child health. Across the continuum of care for women, from family planning and prevention of STDs to pre-natal care to safe delivery and helping mothers with lactation and beyond, the only thing not in place is a workforce that is skilled enough to deliver this relatively basic standard of care.
ECHO can build capacity and expertise because of our trusted global human network. And we are able to grow and sustain that network with our iECHO platform, which connects our partners and enables them to plan, manage, gain insights, and evaluate the learning experience of participants.
Ready for Emergency Response
As we work together to build a capable and resilient health care workforce that can treat NCDs and deliver quality care to women throughout their lifespans, in even the most remote communities, we continue to face epidemics, wars, and natural disasters. All of these unpredictable challenges demand a flexible health care workforce that can surge to respond when the unthinkable happens.
When COVID came in 2020, you all responded in force. In 2024, as the threats of mpox, and Marberg continued to grow in Africa and beyond, the ECHO movement was ready. In war torn Sudan and Ukraine, the ECHO movement helped train the local workforce. And whatever comes our way in 2025 and beyond, I’m confident the ECHO movement will respond with expert telementoring, education, resources, and community.
Our partners are working alongside global and national public health organizations to promote antimicrobial stewardship and share the latest updates on infectious diseases, emerging treatments and strategies to contain them. And at the ECHO Institute, we continue to collaborate closely with the World Health Organization, as a WHO Collaborating Centre and a partner in their digital training and telementoring efforts.
What makes me so confident in our ability to respond to these global public health challenges is that our network is ready to go, linking millions of providers who use our technology, already have time blocked to participate in ECHO sessions, and are ideally suited to help lead an emergency response.
Meeting the Health Equity Challenge
In everything we do, the ECHO Movement is hyper-focused on improving lives in poor and marginalized communities—lives often cut short due to widening racial and gender health inequities. ECHO’s guided practice and knowledge-sharing are bringing better access to care to these communities, while at the same time providing their frontline workers with career development and opportunities for growth.
On a personal note, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to everyone in our global network. Each of you has given your time, energy, or resources to the ECHO movement, in service of our mission to improve lives worldwide.
As Project ECHO begins the new year, we look forward to bringing the whole ECHO movement together, in person, at the MetaECHO Conference in September 2025. We will share stories, research, and strategies to bring the ECHO Model to more people in more communities, and we will use our trusted human network to build a global workforce that is prepared to meet the complex challenges of our time. I invite you to join us.
Warm regards,
Dr. Sanjeev Arora
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