Project ECHO connects people and ideas in the comfort of their offices and homes

Project ECHO’s motto is, “Moving Knowledge, Not People.” ECHO, Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, is a program which is part of the UAA Center for Human Development. Project ECHO creates online learning communities for “educators, service providers, case managers, administrators, families, and others” so they can collaborate and discuss what is pertinent to the needs of their clients.
The ECHO discussions featured on the UAA calendars always looked interesting, so I attended several via Zoom to see what they were about. 

Some of them were aimed at professionals within their respective fields, and some were aimed at both professionals and the clients they served. 

I found that signing up online was easy. Some of the topics, such as the Alaska Vaccine ECHO, offered free learning credits for pharmacists, CME, nurses and foster parents. 

The Mental Health & Developmental Disabilities ECHO specifically reaches out to UAA students in related disciplines as well as professionals such as social workers and disability providers.
The sessions that reached out to clients were very good at sharing information. With those who had the conditions under discussion and/or their relatives, the professionals were good at listening and addressing concerns. The questions were usually general, and the professionals were not giving specific medical advice.
The ECHO website explains that ECHO creates a “hub and spoke” learning loop where the “community participants learn from specialists, community participants learn from each other, [and] specialists learn from community participants as best practices emerge.”

From my perch as an observer, I could see that the learning loop was happening. Sometimes participants were quiet and not talkative or chatty, but in some I saw camaraderie developing between guests who had the conditions being discussed. When there was open discussion, they sometimes addressed each other, which I felt was a big deal especially for people who said they did not get out much. The interaction between professionals was friendly and it didn’t feel like a dry meeting.

After each session, there was a box folder to access the slides and videos, so participants could just participate in the presentation without having to write information down.

I reached out to Karen Heath, Co-Director of the Center for Human Development of which ECHO is a part. I asked if the ECHOs will continue and she wrote back stating that some will and that they are in the process of developing proposals for the coming year.

There are eight more sessions coming up in June to finish out the 2022-2023 fiscal year. Keep an eye on the UAA calendar for more.