Adding Value to Project ECHO’s Tele-mentoring Model: The ECHO Librarian Role

Background: Project ECHO was launched by Dr. Sanjeev Arora in 2003 with the goal of delivering specialized medical knowledge to rural health care providers through no-cost virtual mentoring and case-based learning. ECHO has proven effective across disciplines and geographies as a way to reduce disparities, strengthen health systems, and drive collaborative solutions. There are now over 900 ECHO hubs running more than 5,500 ECHO programs in 62 countries, reaching participants in 193 countries. We introduced the ECHO Librarian role to our showcase ECHO programs in 2020 to enhance the value of each session for ECHO participants, medical directors, and subject-matter experts on the hub team, and to reinforce ECHO’s brand as a trusted source of evidence-based information.

Description: The ECHO Librarian role (aka, “embedded librarian” or “digital librarian”) was first developed by our partners at ECHO Ontario in 2015. We adapted and piloted the role in New Mexico as part of our COVID-response ECHO programs beginning in 2020. The Librarian serves as a member of the interprofessional hub team, providing links to references and resources in the Zoom chat during the session. Most ECHO programs run weekly for one hour, and include a didactic presentation and an anonymized clinical case presentation. The Librarian reviews presentation slides prior to the session, reviews and prepares the references for posting in the Zoom chat, and then searches in real-time for references mentioned by subject matter experts during discussion. We began implementing the role in four of our core COVID-response programs with international audiences. With an overwhelmingly positive response from participants and experts, we expanded the role to begin serving more traditional, long-standing ECHO programs. We track the programs, sessions, and number of participants served; the number of references posted; and the participant feedback on regular post-session surveys. This Information about the ECHO Librarian role is published to a dashboard that demonstrates the impact of our service.

Conclusion: Since piloting the role in Spring 2020 through the end of 2022, our ECHO Librarians have provided support to 32 unique ECHO programs, serving over 100,000 participants on 680 sessions and posting over 8,000 references. We currently support 16 ongoing ECHO programs, covering topics such as COVID-19, Behavioral Health, Climate Change and Human Health, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Hepatitis C, HIV, Infectious Diseases, Palliative Care, Post-COVID, Reproductive Health, and Vaccine Confidence. The role has been featured in several recent peer-reviewed journal articles. We have found that the role is most effective with ECHO programs that are anchored by a strong community of practice and that include research-rich didactics.