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Project ECHO director: statewide hub‑and‑spoke training has treated thousands and expanded rural care
Summary
New Project ECHO executive director Carla Thornton told legislators ECHO’s hub‑and‑spoke learning model has trained providers in every New Mexico county, supported hepatitis C treatment in prisons, and convenes more than 60 statewide programs that delivered tens of thousands of continuing‑education credits and estimated care benefits to hundreds of thousands of patients.
Dr. Carla Thornton, the new executive director of Project ECHO at the University of New Mexico, told the Legislative Health & Human Services committee that ECHO’s model — short didactics plus case‑based, interactive clinical mentoring — expands specialist expertise to community clinicians. She said a 2011 New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients treated by community clinicians trained through ECHO achieved outcomes comparable to those treated by specialists.
Thornton and UNM officials described ECHO’s New Mexico reach: more than 60 ECHO programs serving the state (48 supported by legislative funding), participation from providers in every county, extensive continuing education (more than 19,000 credits reported in the year discussed) and an estimated 314,000 patients who benefited from providers’ ECHO training in 2024.
Examples cited: long‑running hepatitis C clinics including a corrections ECHO that has helped scale prison treatment (the state has high hepatitis C prevalence in corrections); diabetes ECHOs paired with a social‑determinants referral system; behavioral‑health ECHOs supporting the state reforms and CHW/peer‑support training for opioid‑use disorder and overdose response; and a planned suicide‑prevention series to be embedded across ECHO offerings.
Thornton asked legislators to identify priority health topics ECHO should add and offered to provide data on specific programs and local attendance. Committee members praised the model’s clinical mentoring, retention benefits and applicability to behavioral health and social‑needs work.
What’s next: ECHO officials offered ongoing coordination with the Department of Health, the Health Care Authority and county partners to target workforce gaps and to expand CHW and behavioral‑health training across the state.
