What We Do 

Recognizing that system failures in healthcare for people with diabetes has resulted in less than a quarter of them achieving recommended treatment targets, the ECHO Diabetes Action Network (EDAN) was formed to democratize diabetes specialty knowledge to reach frontline healthcare professionals and to empower vulnerable populations living with diabetes. We focus on six areas to achieve our mission:

  • Vulnerable populations: democratizing access to standards of diabetes care

  • Healthcare professional education: broadening diabetes expertise to frontline healthcare workers

  • Collaborative networks: sharing best practices of Diabetes ECHO programming to reduce disparities

  • Quality improvement: leveraging data repositories for monitoring outcomes and quality improvement in Diabetes ECHO programs

  • Amplification: nurturing replication of Diabetes ECHO content and programming

  • Systems: people living with diabetes have suboptimal outcomes not because they are “non-compliant” but rather because the current system of healthcare delivery is failing the majority of these individuals. We believe the ECHO model has role to play in helping change this NOW.

As a citizen sector organization with a public health approach, we work to achieve: best practice sharing to reduce disparities; development of communities of practice in remote and underserved areas to encourage continuous improvement; and collaboration among clinicians, patients, patient advocacy groups, government agencies, scientific and non-profit organizations, foundations, and pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to tackle the multifaceted aspects of diabetes system failures. 

EDAN’s inaugural program, “Addressing Disparities in Diabetes with Project ECHO: A Focus on Chronic Kidney Disease” launched in January 2022 in collaboration with medical education partner, Med-IQ, and diabetes patient advocate partner, DiaTribe, with funding support from Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals.

The initiative built off an ECHO webinar series, Project ECHO Diabetes in the Time of COVID-19, in which primary care teams from 48 states and 122 countries participated in a series of 16 webinars hosted by a hub team of experts from 13 academic institutions and a patient advocacy organization. Project ECHO® is a hub-and-spoke knowledge-sharing model with regularly occurring virtual sessions to link expert multi-disciplinary and interprofessional teams (hubs) with community-based clinicians, often from rural or underserved communities (spokes) via videoconferencing. Each session includes a foundational didactic presentation provided by the hub faculty and deidentified case presentations/discussion to promote mentoring and peer-to-peer learning within the knowledge network. The aim of Project ECHO is to provide a model for the de-monopolization of knowledge so that patients can receive timely, effective, and comprehensive care in the communities in which they live and work, by providers whom they know and trust. ECHO makes specialty care more accessible.

Current EDAN programming focuses on expanding ECHO diabetes learning collaboratives and increasing national attention to the role Project ECHO can play in combating diabetes disparities. EDAN managed learning collaboratives currently include: 

What is Project ECHO®?

During this time of global healthcare crises, the Project ECHO model has a special role to play in quickly helping to connect experts and frontline healthcare professionals caring for patients with diabetes.

The Project ECHO® model was developed in 2003 by the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and is a hub-and-spoke knowledge-sharing model with regularly occurring virtual sessions to link expert multi-disciplinary and interprofessional teams (hubs) with community-based clinicians, often from rural or underserved communities (spokes) via videoconferencing. Each session includes a foundational didactic presentation provided by the hub faculty and deidentified case presentations/discussions to promote mentoring and peer-to-peer learning within the knowledge network. The aim of Project ECHO is to provide a model for the de-monopolization of knowledge so that patients can receive timely, effective, and comprehensive care in the communities in which they live and work, by providers whom they know and trust. ECHO makes specialty care more accessible.