A virtual community-of-practice approach by rural stakeholders in managing pneumoconiosis in the USA: a cross-sectional analysis.

Introduction: The re-emergence of pneumoconiosis, particularly among coal miners (ie black lung), in the USA is a challenge for rural communities because more miners require specialized care while expertise is scarce. The Miners' Wellness TeleECHO (Extension for Community Health Outcomes) Clinic, jointly held by the University of New Mexico and a community hospital in New Mexico, provides structured telementoring to professionals caring for miners, including clinicians, respiratory therapists, home health professionals, benefits counselors, lawyers/attorneys and others, forming a virtual 'community of practice'. This approach has not been utilized and evaluated previously.

Bone Health TeleECHO: a Force Multiplier to Improve the Care of Skeletal Diseases in Underserved Communities.

Purpose Of Review: This review describes the global development of a model of technology-enabled collaborative learning for healthcare professionals called Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) and its applications for the management of patients with skeletal diseases.

Recent Findings: The prototype Bone Health TeleECHO was established in 2015, with others now operational in the USA and other countries, and more expected to follow soon. Each teleECHO program, in the right language and convenient time zone, provides a virtual community of practice for healthcare professionals to benefit from real-time interactive case-based learning and brief didactic presentations on topics of interest.

Project ECHO: Telehealth to Expand Capacity to Deliver Best Practice Medical Care.

Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) was developed at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center to educate health care professionals in underserved communities to treat chronic complex diseases, allowing patients to receive better care, closer to home, with greater convenience, and at lower cost than referral to a specialty center. Videoconferencing technology is used to create learning networks, with case-based discussions as the primary method of education. The 3-year experience of Bone Health TeleECHO, a strategy to improve the care of osteoporosis and reduce the large treatment gap, is discussed.

Leveraging Scarce Resources With Bone Health TeleECHO to Improve the Care of Osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is a common condition with serious consequences because of fractures. Despite availability of treatments to reduce fracture risk, there is a large osteoporosis treatment gap that has reached crisis proportions. There are too few specialists to provide services for patients who need them.