$20M FOR HEALTH WORK

Project ECHO will use funds to improve health care in India

Grant will help UNM’s Project ECHO improve health care in India.

An Albuquerque-born initiative has broken down walls between specialty and primary health care since it was launched in 2003. Now, it’s going to break down some more barriers.

The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center’s Project ECHO will receive $20 million in grants that will allow it to expand and improve its tele-mentoring services to health care providers in India who treat patients with chronic and complex diseases.

One grant will come in the form of a fiveyear, $10 million gift from London and New York-based Co-Impact, a collaborative partnership founded in late 2017 by Olivia Leland, founding director of The Giving Pledge, and partners including Richard Chandler, Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeff Skoll, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Rohini and Nandan Nilekani. The project was selected from a pool of more than 200 initiatives worldwide to receive an inaugural Co-Impact systems change grant.

In addition, the Mumbai, Indiabased Tata Trusts, the country’s oldest philanthropy organization, will

match the Co-Impact grant with an additional $10 million grant.

Dr. Sanjeev Arora, founder and director of Project ECHO, said the grant opportunities will enable the organization to expand its work, transform a health care system that is under-resourced and bring the project closer to the goal of reaching 1 billion lives around the world.

“India is a country with a very large population — about 1.2 billion people live there — lots of underserved people,” Arora said. “The ability for us to demonstrate that ECHO can improve care for such a large number of patients for the most common health care problems … and prove that the model can work in the least resourced countries in the world.”

The ECHO “hub-and-spoke” model does not directly provide care to patients, but links expert specialist teams at an academic hub with primary care clinicians in local communities though “teleECHO” programs.

During teleECHO clinics, primary care clinicians, the spokes in the ECHO model, present patient cases to the specialist teams and to each other, discuss new developments relating to their patients and determine treatment. The primary clinicians become part of a learning community, where they receive mentoring from specialists and develop the skills they need to treat particular conditions, such as hepatitis C, HIV, tuberculosis, chronic pain, endocrinology and behavioral health disorders.

Since the project was launched around 16 years ago to respond to the thousands of New Mexicans with hepatitis C who could not get the treatment because there were no specialists where they lived, the ECHO model has expanded to cover more than 60 disease areas and complex issues with 256 academic hubs and around 600 projects ongoing in 34 countries, according to Arora.

Over the years, Arora has received more than $65 million in grant support for the project.