COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article
Front. Health Serv.
Sec. Implementation Science
This article is part of the Research TopicDissemination and Implementation Science in MedicineView all 25 articles
Lessons Learned Implementing an Innovative Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) Program
Provisionally accepted
- 1Dartmouth Health, Lebanon, United States
- 2Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine, Hanover, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
As the United States faces mounting challenges to improving health outcomes, new strategies are needed to address root drivers of health and engage community partners to change the community conditions that impact health and health disparities. Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) is a telementoring model developed in 2003 at the University of New Mexico to disseminate knowledge, share evidence-based care practices, and create communities of learning. The ECHO model has been shown to improve clinical outcomes by training primary care care clinicians to provde care often delegated to specialists. This paper describes modifications to ECHO programming to improve population health through engagement of diverse, community audiences in order to impact non-clinical contributors to health. During these community-facing ECHO courses, participants learn from short didactic sessions, share best practices through case-based presentations, and increase connections between sectors of the community and the health system. Implementation of this novel ECHO program is described using the RE-AIM and CFIR frameworks. Adapting the ECHO model to support collaborative learning to impact upstream drivers of health may be an important innovation for improving population health.
Keywords: Community education, Echo, Implementation frameworks, innovation, population health
Received: 08 Aug 2025; Accepted: 15 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kraft, Colgan, Carlos and Savage. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sally Kraft
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.