What is it?

Project ECHO® (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) offers a lifelong learning and guided practice model that revolutionizes education and increases workforce capacity by sharing knowledge across distance. Specialists at the "hub" site meet regularly with professionals in local communities via videoconferencing to train in the delivery of specialty care services. Using video conferencing technology, participants connect with a webcam and microphone, a tablet, or a smartphone – from their workplace. This linkage creates a virtual learning collaborative made up of an interdisciplinary “hub” team sharing their best-practice expertise and mentoring with participants in different communities. The ECHO model TM , developed at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, does not actually provide care directly to patients. Instead, it provides front-line professionals with the knowledge and support they need to manage complex conditions in local communities. This dramatically increases access to specialty treatment, particularly in rural and underserved areas. 

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Telehealth ROCKS ECHO is part of the HRSA-funded project. It is designed to provide "telementoring" to assist local community professionals such as the medical, mental and behavioral health fields, nursing, school personnel, and other professionals in developing expertise in developmental and behavioral disorders to increase their capacity to identify and treat disorders in local settings. The ECHO telementoring model bridges the gap between healthcare knowledge and local providers using established adult learning principles and practice change strategies.

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A Telehealth ROCKS ECHO session is modeled after a virtual grand rounds, when community, health/healthcare, and school-based providers from multiple locations connect at regularly scheduled times with a specialist or team of specialists through video conferencing. During these ECHO sessions, participants present de-identified student/patient case examples to a specialist or expert teams who mentor the participants to manage students with complex conditions. These case-based discussions are supplemented with short didactic presentations from the hub team of experts to improve content knowledge and share evidence-based practices.