How would I cope with being down on my luck, without a good job, a nice house to come home to in the evening, and so many other parts of daily life we so often take for granted? I imagine I might be depressed and anxious. I might have difficulty coping with my situation, and that would only make it all the more difficult to get back on my feet again. Maybe, I’d recognize my need for help, but not…
Amidst all the fanfare about CHC kicking off Project ECHO® in Connecticut and the discussions about innovative use of telemedicine to improve health outcomes, it could be easy to lose focus on what truly matters, the patient. Yet CHC is a Patient Centered Medical Home, which is more than just a nice title added to the website, and the patient centered aspect shone through in the first Project ECHO teleconference. Yes, there were the introductory speeches, the photographers and the…
The following is a guest post from Dr. Marwan Haddad MD, MPH, Medical Director of HIV, HCV, and Buprenorphine Services at Community Health Center, Inc. This Friday January 20th is the launch of the very cutting edge, state of the art, evidence-based program CHC Project ECHO® Hepatitis C/HIV. Project ECHO® stands for Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes and is a model that was developed at the University of New Mexico initially to extend Hepatitis C care and management to the…
The following is an email from Dr. Marwan Haddad to our CHC staff helping in the day to day battle against AIDS: We are now three decades into the HIV epidemic. Though we have made great strides in these last 30 years, HIV continues to be a local, national, and global problem! The latest statistics from CDC estimate about 1.2 million people in the U.S. are infected with the virus but only 80% are diagnosed. Of those diagnosed, only about half…
Conversations focuses this week on an innovative model of care that’s linking primary care providers with specialists in rural and underserved areas of the country. Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Sanjeev Arora, founder of Project ECHO®, about how the ECHO model has the potential to increase access, improve health outcomes, and support primary care providers in caring for complex conditions.
One of the challenges of being a health care blogger is taking the language of grant proposals and peer reviewed journal articles and translating it into something that the average person can understand. A recent meeting I attended illustrates this fairly well. Last week, I attended the “eConsults Study Core Team Kick-Off Meeting” where we discussed a new study, “An Evaluation of an Electronic Consultation (‘eConsult’) Platform to Increase Specialist Access for Patients in Underserved Populations: Impact on Wait Times,…