What We Do 

Despite advances in treatment, fewer than one-quarter of people living with diabetes consistently achieve recommended care targets. These persistent gaps reflect the need to strengthen how diabetes care is delivered and how clinicians are supported—particularly in rural and medically underserved communities.

The ECHO Diabetes Action Network (EDAN) expands access to specialty-level diabetes knowledge by equipping frontline health care professionals with education, mentorship, and collaborative support. Through the Project ECHO® model, we build sustainable clinical capacity so high-quality care can be delivered locally.

We focus on six core areas:

  1. Expanding Access to High-Quality Diabetes Care:

    Strengthening access to evidence-based standards of care in rural and medically underserved communities.

  2. Workforce Education

    Broadening diabetes expertise among frontline primary care clinicians, community health workers, and care teams.

  3. Collaborative Learning Networks

    Connecting ECHO hubs nationwide to share best practices, curricula, implementation strategies.

  4. Quality Improvement

    Leveraging data and shared learning to monitor outcomes, improve performance, and advance value-based care in Diabetes ECHO programs

  5. Diabetes Program Expansion

    Supporting replication and scaling of diabetes-focused ECHO programs across states and health systems.

  6. Care Delivery Transformation

    Advancing system-level improvements so people living with diabetes receive timely, coordinated, and comprehensive care close to home.

OUR APPROACH 

As a citizen sector organization (CSO), EDAN operates as a public health–oriented collaborative, bringing together clinicians, academic institutions, Tribal health systems, patient advocates, government partners, nonprofit organizations, and industry stakeholders to address the multifaceted challenges of diabetes care.

Highlighted Programs & Learning collaboratives

EDAN supports diabetes-related ECHO programming through structured learning collaboratives, including:

  • Diabetes-Endo ECHO Learning Collaborative

    A network of 37 ECHO hubs advancing diabetes-focused programming through monthly peer learning sessions, guest faculty presentations, and a shared resource repository.

    EDAN also provides technical assistance to support program design, curriculum development, implementation, quality measurement, and sustainability planning. The collaborative helps align diabetes ECHO initiatives with workforce development, specialty access, and technology-enabled care priorities—strengthening frontline primary care capacity in rural and medically underserved communities.

  • Diabetes & CKD Collaborative

    A regional hub collaborative focused on improving diabetes-related chronic kidney disease care through structured Project ECHO programming, case-based learning, and multidisciplinary mentorship.

    Collaborative members contributed to the development of an implementation toolkit to support integration of diabetes-related CKD curricula into existing ECHO programs. The toolkit was also developed into an interactive training module to facilitate broader dissemination and replication and is available HERE.

  • ECHO Diabetes and the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP)

    EDAN is championing the expansion of diabetes-focused Project ECHO initiatives within the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP). More than a dozen states have included Project ECHO in their RHTP applications. The Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) tip sheet on Project ECHO outlines how states can leverage Medicaid innovation to improve care delivery, strengthen access, build workforce capacity, and promote long-term sustainability in rural communities.

    EDAN provides technical support to state ECHO programs seeking to leverage RHTP funding to expand diabetes-focused initiatives and strengthen rural health systems.

    EDAN supports program planning, curriculum development, faculty engagement, performance measurement, and sustainability strategy to ensure diabetes-related ECHO initiatives align with RHTP priorities—such as workforce development, specialty access, technology-enabled care, and value-based outcomes. Through this approach, states can expand access to high-quality diabetes care while building sustainable local capacity and transforming rural care delivery.

What is Project ECHO®?

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.