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UW Pain Medicine Patient Care:
Project ECHO
Extension for Community Health Outcomes

General Project Overview

The University of Washington Division of Pain Medicine has introduced Project ECHO/UW Pain (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), an expansion in content and scope of an effective videoconference-based consultative knowledge network providing specialty panel expertise to assist in the management of challenging chronic pain problems.

Each Wednesday, 12:00pm — 1:30pm PST, Project ECHO/UW Pain conducts collegial, interactive videoconferences, including:

  1. Didactics on useful chronic pain topics for primary care providers.
  2. Live case presentations from community clinicians
  3. Interactive consultations for providers with a multidisciplinary panel of specialists.

During these videoconferences, you are invited to present your difficult chronic pain cases to our panel of pain specialists representing diverse pain expertise in the specialties of internal medicine, anesthesiology, rehabilitation medicine, psychiatry, addiction medicine, and nursing care coordination during each weekly session. Feel free to ask questions, even if you have not presented a case. The goal is to increase your knowledge and skills to treat chronic pain in your community practice.

Project ECHO/UW Pain will significantly increase access to multidisciplinary experts capable of prompt real-time treatment support in the care and treatment for the most challenging patients in pain. As already demonstrated at the University of New Mexico's Project ECHO, videoconference consultation improves outcomes and patient and provider satisfaction over geographically dispersed populations. Project ECHO/UW Pain will extend the University of Washington's world recognized best practice pain care approach to increased numbers of primary care and specialty care providers in rural, tribal, suburban, urban, and safety net populations throughout the widely dispersed geographic areas of the Northwest, extending pain care expertise throughout the states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho.

Project ECHO/UW Pain will provide outreach and education using measurement based clinical instruments that can more precisely assess an individual patient's response to the many types of treatments provided as well as allow outcome assessment of effectiveness of treatments for individuals and for much larger population groups.

Project ECHO/UW Pain case conferences and short didactic presentations significantly reduces the effect of limited access to scarce pain specialty care throughout this wide geographic region and diverse demography by creating knowledge networks linked through the University of Washington. Project ECHO/UW Pain will also meet the need for easily accessible pain management consultations that are now required by the Washington State Department of Health regulations that specifically endorse the use of such innovative consultative approaches for chronic non-cancer pain patients with high risk and/or poor outcomes despite use of high dose opioids.

Project ECHO Information