United States
Focused on Implementing Long-Term Solutions for the Country’s Most Pressing Problems
Project ECHO remained at the forefront of addressing national health priorities in 2023.
Across the United States, the ECHO Institute and our ECHO partners tackled the opioid epidemic. To provide more comprehensive coverage to patients, we used a combination of state and collaborative regional programming, and partnered with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The ECHO Institute launched the first national Violence Prevention ECHO program to equip clinicians with the communication skills needed to have important, and difficult, conversations about substance use and related issues, including domestic violence, suicidality, loneliness and gun violence.
Project ECHO was also included as a key part of the White House’s proposal for a five-year, $12.3 billion hepatitis-C elimination program. With more than 20 years of experience since our first hepatitis-C ECHO program, the ECHO Institute, and our partners across the United States, stand ready to support the initiative.
Ensuring HIV Infectious Disease Expertise Reaches Rural Providers
What began in 2013 as one ECHO program serving physicians in northwestern New Mexico, the HIV Indian Country ECHO now includes programs in rural and under served urban areas across the country.
Grown from New Mexico’s ongoing partnership with the South Central AIDS Education and Training Center, providers in the HIV ECHO meet monthly to discuss the nuances of HIV care: from how to treat HIV alongside substance-use disorders to providing more aggressive forms of HIV prevention, such as pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis medicines..
With the national HIV treatment guidelines reaching hundreds of pages, ECHO specialists meet an important need by distilling their working knowledge into best practices for providers on the ground, providing a lifeline to busy care providers and their rural patients.
There isn’t any way we could be having this impact—here in northern New Mexico, and in both urban and rural places where our participants are based—without ECHO.”
Dr. Jonathan Iralu
Chief Clinical Consultant for Infectious Diseases, Indian Health Services, Gallup Indian Medical Center, Gallup, New Mexico
