TeleEcho for palliative care

The transfer of cancer care expertise from one city to the next is often hampered by administrative siloes, language barriers and differences in technology between sites. Early knowledge-transfer programmes have shown potential, but their impact has been limited.

In 2020 City Cancer Challenge (C/Can) partnered with Project ECHO, a movement which strives to demonopolise knowledge and amplify capacity to provide best-practice care to under-represented people all over the world through replications of the ECHOTM online learning model.

Through the pilot programme, entitled “C/Can Quality Improvement of Cancer Care Systems TeleECHOTM”, to help project teams in C/Can cities share their policy drafts and products to ensure patient-centric cancer care, and agree on metrics to measure the quality improvement of key practices in their respective clinics.

The ECHOTM model has four basic objectives: to use technology to leverage scarce resources, share best practices to reduce disparity, develop case-based learning to master complexity and create a web-based database to monitor outcomes.

By doing so, the project has improved the quality of the final products that each project team develops, providing expert knowledge and policy-planning advice remotely to the project teams in individual C/Can cities and supporting them in the implementation of their respective work plans in a cost-effective manner.